monkey's uncle

As part of a series of articles on interdisciplinary environmental research at Stanford, the Stanford Report has just published a nice piece on the research on Aboriginal burning in Western Australia led by Rebecca and Doug Bird. This work is supported by a grant from the Woods Institute Environmental Venture Project fund as well as [...]

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I recently received some comments on my post describing our PNAS paper from the end of 2008 in which we demonstrated that aboriginal burning increases grassland biodiversity.  The comments were very angry — and a little incoherent.  Clearly, emotions were (and are) running high in Aus following the the tragic bushfires in Victoria that have [...]

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On the topic of science reporting, it’s nice to see it done right.

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Our new paper at PNAS has been out a day now and Wired Magazine has already done a story on it.  It’s a nice piece but it gets several things hilariously wrong. It says: Bird’s team recently published a study on “fire stick farming,” a traditional method of ecosystem management still used by aborigines in Australia’s Western [...]

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We have a new paper out in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.  The paper suggests that subsistence related burning increases local landscape heterogeneity and may promote biodiversity in Australia’s Western Desert.  What’s really interesting about this is that promoting biodiversity is not the goal of individual hunters – they [...]

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