Researchers

DR NICK DAVIDSONDr Nick Davidson

Adjunct Professor
Institute for Land, Water and Society

New Institute adjunct professor  Dr Nick Davidson sees his connection with Charles Sturt University “as the closing of a circle”.

Nick, who is based in Switzerland and is the Deputy Secretary General for the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, is keen to build on his links with CSU and Australia for a number of reasons. Being one quarter Australian (the other quarter is Scottish, the other half English) Nick, a coastal ecologist with particular interests in wetland and waterbird conservation and management, has an affinity with Australia that goes back to his great great-grandfather (on his mother’s side), an architect from London who came to Australia in the 1820s. Charles White bought land near Adelaide at a place called Reed Beds, a wetland he drained and grew fruit on.

“Interestingly two generations of his direct descendents became well-known ornithologists,” says Nick who, on his father’s side, has an Australian cousin who is also an ornithologist. “So in some form wetlands and ornithology seem to be in the blood, and maybe through my work I’m now trying to redress the balance of my ancestors’ destruction of wetlands.” Nick says he has known of Charles Sturt, the explorer after whom the university is named, ever since he was a small child “which is probably rather unusual for someone from Britain. But one of my most treasured books as a child was a biography of Charles Sturt given to me by my godfather who was a direct descendent of his. Developing a linkage with Charles Sturt University is a very satisfying way of connecting my past and my present. It’s an added bonus to being invited to work with Max and the Institute for mutual benefits. The Convention can only benefit from the expertise here and the opportunity to collaborate on our common ground, bringing our expertise together.”

Nick has been a colleague of Max for some time now, mostly as a result of Max’s involvement with the Ramsar Convention, the oldest global (multi-lateral) environmental agreements between governments. Australia is one of 159 Contracting Parties (countries) who have signed the agreement which addresses the conservation and  ise use of wetlands world-wide. Max is the longest serving member of the Convention’s Scientific and Technical Review Panel, formed in 1993. The panel is made up of a team of experts charged with providing advice and guidance to Governments on a wide range of issues to do with the Convention’s implementation. Currently Max is its “Wetlands and Climate Change” theme leader.

Nick’s background is in coastal and estuarine ecology, conservation research and migratory waterbird science, in particular on one species of shorebird, the Red Knot. He did his degree in Zoology at the University of Aberdeen and then his Doctorate at the University of Durham in north east England during the 1970s. “In the foolish enthusiasm of youth what I was researching was how shorebirds survive the severity of the northern winter,” says Nick, now 56 years of age. “To find that out I spent three winters sitting on the beach of an island off the north east coast of England. It gradually dawned on me that to find out how the birds did it, the researcher also had to survive …I think my key finding was that the birds did fine but the researcher froze!”

 Nick went on to do post-doctoral research at Durham on the management and restoration of degraded coastal systems, before moving into nature conversation agencies in the UK, where he worked on development planning, coastal inventory and assessment, and communications. He then spent a few years in the Netherlands with Wetlands International as its International Science Coordinator before taking up his current role with the Ramsar Convention nearly 10 years ago. While Nick’s role with the Convention’s Secretariat (based in the offices of the headquarters of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Gland, Switzerland), is as the Convention’s senior advisor on scientific, technical and policy issues, he does also “keep a fingertip on research.”

“Like so many of us, I’m still trying to write up papers from all that data I collected many years ago,” laughs Nick who is currently analyzing global trends of shorebird populations. “I am looking at whether or not they are giving us a signal that the world is meeting a target it committed to at the United Nations’ World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002, which was to significantly reduce the rate of loss of biodiversity by 2010. All the indications are, for shorebirds at least, that not only are we not meeting that target, but the situation is getting worse rather than better.”

Nick, who also coordinates the work of the Convention’s Scientific and Technical Review Panel, sees the linkage between science, conservation and policy as a key focus of his work. “My motivation is to connect science and policy; to explain to researchers and scientists how to make their key findings relevant to policy so that decision makers in government will understand them,” he says. “Too often the scientific community think that if it publishes its findings in journals, that’s it. But advisors to government, and politicians, don’t read those journals so we need to make sure that the intelligence is available in the right way for those who influence the state of our wetlands.”

Nick has been working on wetland inventory for many years now. “But even with all the help modern and developing tools of satellite imagery and remote sensing can contribute to knowing where the wetlands are and what is happening to them, we still don’t have a good picture, world-wide, of what is happening with wetlands,” says Nick. “But wherever we look we get the same story, they are in decline, they are degrading, they need more attention… A global review of wetland inventories that Max and I did for the Convention in 1999 pointed out how few governments, at that time, knew where their wetlands were. If you don’t know that, how are you going to make sensible decisions about what to do with them as you won’t even know when one disappears?”


*Nick was in Australia in August 2009 to present at the Society for Ecological Restoration International conference in Perth, and to finalise a number of papers and reports with Institute director Prof Max Finlayson. 
Article appeared in Connections # 19,  November 2009