The Great Southern Reef

A public lecture with Nestor Echedey Bosch Guerra, Postdoctoral Fellow, Biodiversity and Conservation Group, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and UWA Robert and Maude Gledden Visiting Fellow.

The Great Southern Reef is the underwater garden stretching across the backyard of 7 in 10 Australians. Despite its vast extension and socio-ecological significance, spanning > 8,000 km of coastline and contributing to at least AU$10 billion year, this majestic underwater forest has historically been forgotten relative to its more charismatic tropical counterparts (the Great Barrier Reef and Ningaloo Reef).

In this talk, Dr Bosch will immerse you in the biological uniqueness of this interconnected marine ecosystem, highlighting efforts carried out by passionate individuals from academia, industry, and politics to safeguard the critical functions and services it provides to nearly 19 million Australians. Taking an integrative approach, he will outline advances in the fields of genomics, population biology, ecology, and socioeconomics to understand the functioning of the Great Southern Reef and improve its future conservation under raising climatic and local human stressors.

Nestor E. Bosch is a post-doctoral researcher at Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain). Since his early childhood, he developed a deep connection with the marine environment, shaped by the cultural maritime heritage of island communities whose lives and traditions are intimately tied to the sea. His research has focused on the biogeographic, ecological, and evolutionary drivers that have resulted in the biological communities we see today. He has an integrative vision to understand marine biodiversity, combining functional and phylogenetic information to unravel the effect of multiple eco-evolutionary drivers. His overarching goal is to provide generalizable insights that can improve projections of future marine biodiversity under a rapidly changing environment.

Dr Bosch is a UWA Gledden Visiting Fellow, working with Dr Thomas Wernberg in the Indian Ocean Marine Research Centre, UWA School of Biological Sciences.

VENUE: UWA ALBANY CAMPUS