David Pike Heydon-Laurence Building, A08 University of Sydney NSW 2006 Room: 447 Office: (02) 9351 8679 Fax: (02) 9351 5609 e-mail: d.pike@usyd.edu.au

Dissertation Research Sea Turtle Research Education Publications Oral Presentations Grants and Awards Affiliations

My dissertation focuses on reptile conservation on a landscape-scale, namely creating optimal habitat for reptiles in a fire-suppressed landscape. My two main study species are the broad-headed snake Hoplocephalus bungaroides, an endangered elapid endemic to the Sydney region, and the main prey of juvenile snakes, velvet geckos Oedura lesueurii. These two species overwinter underneath rocks on open cliff edges that have very little vegetative cover. This allows them to thermoregulate during winter, and their shelter sites normally stay quite warm because the sun hits the rocks during most of the day.

However, following European settlement of Australia, the amount of vegetation (i.e., canopy shading) in many habitats has increased. The most likely causes for this change are the prevention of natural disturbance events, such as wildfires, and the cessation of aboriginal fire-stick farming, which aboriginal peoples used to effectively managed habitat for wildlife and food plants. In more recent times vegetation has encroached upon crucial habitat for the broad-headed snake, which is already restricted in distribution. This has decreased the amount of suitable overwintering habitat, and potentially has contributed to a range-wide decline. My main focus is on trying to determine whether removing shady vegetation will increase vital rates of broad-headed snakes and velvet geckos. Rather than using fire to attempt this restoration (which is often an unsuccessful strategy in severely overgrown habitats), I am directly manipulating canopy cover by removing shade trees. In this way I can directly determine whether canopy shading is a causal factor in reptile declines while controlling for other unwanted effects, such as fire.  This is a landscape scale experiment and my sampling plots are distributed along a 5km stretch of cliffline. I have equal replicates of canopy removal plots, open canopy controls, and shady controls. This study is the first to examine whether landscape-scale habitat manipulations can improve habitat quality for an endangered reptile.

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Sea Turtle Research

My latest sea turtle work focuses on two areas: (1) how coastal development affects hatching success of incubating nests, and (2) the impacts of climate change (warming ocean temperatures, increasing cyclones/hurricanes, warming nesting beach temperatures) on nesting populations. I am in currently using predictive models to examine how the global distribution of turtle nesting may change under climate warming scenarios. Nesting beaches are limited in distribution to tropical, sub-tropical, and (for some species) temperate areas. Climate change could alter the environments such that more areas become suitable for nesting (by areas that are currently too cold for nesting becoming warmer), have no effect at all, or cause a contraction of current nesting areas (through a complex interaction of temperature and precipitation which results in novel climates at nesting beaches). Each of these outcomes have different implications for conservation, and I am examining both broad-scale and local-scale predictions of future nesting areas under a range of climate scenarios. This work includes all 7 species of marine turtles, and at the fine scale is examining how different genetically-distinct populations may respond. Preliminary work shows that sea turtle nesting is limited by climate, and that climate change will not result in a dramatic expansion of novel nesting areas.

My recent work on how coastal development lowers egg survival at developed nesting beaches has received considerable attention in the literature (through a rebuttal to my paper published in Biology Letters; see publication list) and through interest by the media:

BBC Radio (The Naked Scientists): Turtles and tourism

Sydney Morning Herald: Beach living threatens turtles

Science Alert Australia and New Zealand: Habitation harms turtle fertility

Daily News and Analysis: Beach lovers turn turtles’ lives upside down

Wild Biology: Turtles like deserted beaches

Indian Ocean-Southeast Asian Marine Turtle Memorandum of Understanding: Habitatation harms sea turtle fertility
 
 

 
2010            PhD Biology, University of Sydney (thesis submission, January 2010). Supervisors: Prof. Rick Shine and Dr. Jonno Webb

2004            MSc Biology, magna cum laude, Towson University. Supervisor: Dr. Richard A. Seigel

2002            BSc Zoology with Honors, Spanish Minor, cum laude, North Carolina State University
 

 

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Professional Affiliations

                                                            American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists
                                                            Australian Society of Herpetologists
                                                            Central European Journal of Biology (English language editor)
                                                            Chelonian Conservation Organization
                                                            Ecological Society of America
                                                            Ecological Society of Australia
                                                            Herpetological Conservation and Biology (Assistant Editor)
                                                            Herpetological Review (English language editor)
                                                            Herpetologists’ League
                                                            International Sea Turtle Society
                                                            Journal of Herpetology (English language editor)
                                                            Partners in Amphibian and Reptile Conservation
                                                            Sigma Xi (Associate Member)
                                                            Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles

 

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