CACHE Member ARC Linkage Success: A/Prof Donna Houston and Dr Alexandra Carthey

CACHE is delighted to share the wonderful news of a successful ARC Linkage Grant! CACHE congratulates our members Associate Professor Donna Houston and Dr Alexandra Carthey and their colleagues on the award of an ARC LinkageProject,Urban Rewilding: Ecologically and Community-informed Futures.

Our CACHE members Associate Professor Donna Houston and Dr Alexandra Carthey are Chief Investigators on the Linkage Project led by The University of Sydney. The project team includes Dr Thomas Newsome, Professor Phil McManus (USYD), Associate Professor Donna Houston (MQ), Dr John Martin (Taronga Zoo), Dr Catherine Grueber and Professor Peter Banks (USYD) with ten partner organisations.

The Urban Rewilding: Ecologically and Community-informed Futures project aims to prevent further wildlife loss by creating a blueprint for the ecological restoration of urban spaces. The team will be working with seven Councils and three State government agencies in northern Sydney, to address the loss of biodiversity in Australian cities. The project will experimentally assess a new approach to conservation by restoring regionally-present but locally-missing wildlife.

Associate Professor Donna Houston is the Chair of the Discipline of Geography and Planning, Co-Director of the Faculty of Arts Environmental Humanities Research Group and a founding member of the Shadow Places Network. Donna is an urban and cultural geographer. Her research focuses on environmental justice in climate-changing worlds; geographies of extinction, and urban planning in more-than-human cities. She is particularly interested in how cultural methodologies such as storytelling, visual methods and cultural memory can be used to address current social and environmental challenges.

Long-nosed bandicoots (Perameles nasuta) like the one in this camera trap photo, were once common across Sydney. Now, they are limited in their distribution, occurring in some patchy bush remnants but not others. Bandicoots will be one of the candidate species considered for reintroduction to suitable areas. Photo credit: MQ FSE MRes student Emily Hegarty captured this image during her research.

Donna will work on the social science aspects of the project. This includes working with the interdisciplinary CI team, POs and local residents to better understand community dimensions of urban rewilding.  Connecting ecologically and community informed futures is an important innovation of the project. Donna will use social research methods to contribute to the design of restoration plans and to understandings of diverse community values and social benefits of urban biodiversity conservation.

Dr Alexandra Carthey is a Macquarie University Research Fellow (MQRF) in the School of Natural Sciences. She uses novel, collaborative, cross-disciplinary approaches to develop innovative research that tackles species decline associated with the twin problems of invasive species and disturbed ecosystems. She combines behavioural, chemical, and microbial ecology approaches to understanding the role of introduced predators such as cats and foxes in Australian ecosystems. Her research asks questions about how invasive species disturb trophic interactions such as predation and herbivory, with a view to conserving native species and addressing the current biodiversity crisis.

Alex will work to consolidate historical and project partners’ (Sydney City Council) knowledge about locally missing species that were formerly present on the Northern Beaches. She will also contribute her ecological knowledge to the design of restoration plans, and assist with experimental translocations of native fauna into northern Sydney.

Overall, the project overall hopes to restore ecosystem services provided by wildlife and increased opportunities for community engagement with nature. The benefits will also include initiating rewilding in urban areas, improved public education on the benefits of restoring wildlife and greater potential to conserve our biodiversity and cultural heritage

Congratulations to Donna, Alexandra and the team! CACHE looks forward to following and supporting their continued success. We welcome this cross-faculty consilient work on biodiversity transformation.

For more on Donna’s work, see her Macquarie University profile, and engage with her on Twitter. For more on Alexandra’s work, her Macquarie University profile and Twitter are linked here.

Image Top-Right: Associate Professor Donna Houston and Dr Alexandra Carthey