DR scott carroll
2007 Alumni Initiative Grant recipient
Dr Scott Carroll is one of two inaugural recipients of the 2007 Fulbright Alumni Initiative Grant. Scott, currently with the Centre for Population Biology at the University of California Davis, will work with The University of Queensland on a project on Evolutionary Conservation Biology.
Scott was a Senior Scholar to Australia in 2003 at The University of Queensland and returned to this Australian institution in 2007 to build on UQ’s existing relationship with the University of California Davis in this area.
“Building on our published discoveries of contemporary evolution in Australian and American ecosystems, we will foster a new applied sub-discipline, ‘Evolutionary Conservation Biology’. Ongoing evolution may be harnessed to protect natural communities faced with global change.”
In meetings with colleagues who manage human-altered environments, we will elucidate prospects for evolutionary solutions. We will use the linkages so created to initiate an international centre for applied evolutionary biology to coordinate our efforts,” explains Scott.
“My original program asked whether members of native Australian communities could evolve fast enough to serve as agents of a heretofore unrecognised form of containment for invasive organisms, ‘adaptive biological control’.
In fifteen peer-reviewed papers, an edited volume and an edited textbook that have followed since my return to UC-Davis in mid-2004, my colleagues and I have built on that discovery to consider the deeper implications of our findings for evolutionary biology, and the broader implications for conservation biology. Just as other disciplines of biology, from agriculture to medicine, have benefited in recent years from an overdue marriage to Evolutionary Biology, Conservation Biology is poised to take the same productive step.”
This development is mandated by the discovery that many, if not most organisms, in disturbed habitats are evolving in response to environmental change. The organic processes we have set in motion represent the major challenges, and opportunities, for creating a sustainable Conservation Biology in the coming decades according to Scott. Promising evolutionary applications in medicine and agriculture are also being developed, but those efforts are mutually isolated, both professionally and conceptually. To unite the strengths of these fields, in 2009 we will convene the first summit of evolutionary biologists with innovators in medicine, agriculture, and environmental sciences, as well as government leaders and industry stakeholders.
The relationship between UQ and UC-Davis will benefit from the greater and more formalised relations that this project can generate believes Scott. “In addition, as environmental concerns will likely be the chief issue of the century, such relations may be readily extended to other partner institutions, both urban and rural.”