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2006 SITE

4-22 July 2005

UQ St Lucia Campus, Brisbane, QLD

PUBLIC LECTURE

The Mathematics of Biodiversity Conservation

Go forth and multiply

Professor HUGH POSSINGHAM

7PM
Thursday 7 July 2005
(followed by supper)

Parnell Building Lecture Theatre
Building 7 (see map)
The University of Queensland, St Lucia Campus

The world is in the midst of an extinction crisis; as many as half of all species may become extinct over the next couple of hundred years. International non-government agencies such as the World Wide Fund for Nature and governments across the world need to decide where best to invest their conservation dollars. These agencies have defined global hotspots based on numbers of endemic species and the rate of loss of habitat. Unfortunately they have not formulated their problem mathematically so they cannot find optimal solutions. In this talk Hugh shows how this problem can be formulated as a mathematical problem and solved using optimisation tools. He then looks at the problem of how to choose between sites within hotspots and demonstrates how our mathematical software is being used to design marine reserve systems all over the world, including the Great Barrier Reef.

Professor Hugh Possingham Director, the Ecology Centre, University of Queensland, Australia Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science Obsessive bird watcher

To RSVP or for further information contact Helen Grey: email hg@maths.uq.edu.au; phone 3365 3337.

The public lecture is sponsed by QAMT (Queensland Association of Mathematics Teachers) as part of the ICE-EM Australian Graduate School in Mathematics being held at The University of Queensland in July 2005.