Environmental Futures Seminar - Jarrod Sopniewski

The Earth is in an extinction crisis. Species across the globe are faced with seemingly endless threats, including habitat loss, invasive species, and climate change. Conserving threatened species is an enormous challenge, and one that must be faced from multiple angles. One is through considering how threatening processes affect species in the context of their ecological niche: the subset of environmental conditions in which they have evolved and are to persist within. In this talk, I will discuss how we can view conservation challenges at broad scales by examining how threatening processes differentially affect species throughout their ecological niche. I will then show how this frame of thinking is being applied to guide a current, landscape-scale attempt to reintroduce a locally extinct frog to the ACT.

Jarrod Sopniewski is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Conservation Ecology and Genomics at the University of Canberra, where he is primarily working on a large project to reintroduce the threatened Green and Golden Bell Frog to the ACT. He completed his PhD at the University of Western Australia, where he studied as a Hackett Scholar. His research to date has primarily been focused around using genomic and ecological modelling methods to tackle landscape-scale conservation problems, with a specific emphasis on exploring the challenges posed to frogs by the invasive pathogen chytrid fungus.