Melanie Bishop is Professor of Marine Ecology at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.
Her benthic ecological research addresses how coastal ecosystems operate and respond to change. In particular, her work has developed a new understanding of how habitat-forming species promote biodiversity, ecosystem function and resilience of ecosystems to environmental stress.
She has used this understanding to innovate new approaches to ecological restoration and to the environmentally sustainable design of marine constructions.
She is co-leader of the award-winning Living Seawalls program and was co-leader of the Green Engineering Group of the World Harbour Project.
Presentation:
Habitat by design: a toolkit for the nature repair of urbanised coasts
Prof Melanie Bishop,
School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University NSW 2109 Australia
The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework sets the global target of restoring 30% of degraded marine habitats by 2030. This represents a particular challenge for estuarine and coastal areas where close to complete extirpation of functional ecosystems has left little foundation for repairing habitats or where the concentration of human population can introduce significant human-use conflict. Nature repair along urbanised coasts therefore requires novel solutions that blend traditional approaches to ecological restoration with nature-based solutions, conservation aquaculture and the eco-engineering of artificial habitats into marine constructions. In this talk I will overview how these various approaches to nature repair can be effectively implemented and blended along urban coastlines to reinstate native biodiversity and its important functions and services whilst simultaneously providing for sustainable human use. I will provide examples of how key processes influencing ecosystem establishment such as self-facilitation, niche construction and sensory ecology, have been integrated into nature repair projects utilising both natural and artificial substrates. I will also overview how standards developed to guide evidence-based and scientifically rigorous ecological restoration can be applied to eco-engineering and nature-based solutions to ensure they achieve tangible environmental benefits. In many instances nature has come up with the optimal design, and by looking to the structure and function of remnant ecosystems we can design and build robust foundations for reinstating nature.