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Tempo and Mode: Centre for Macroevolution and Macroecology special seminar. All welcome.

Aboriginal people, including those in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, for over 40,000 years have demonstrated that it is the social and cultural elements that control the ecological values in this arid landscape.

Here, there remains a continuous original connection of Aboriginal people to the landscape in an area where land management activities are applied without apprehension, without restraint, all ingrained and intertwined into cultural and social elements that result in an intact, productive and resilient landscape that hold many of the nations threatened and vulnerable species.

This presentation will identify the reasons for this, focusing on the inputs of Aboriginal people in the central desert region of Australia that drive the successful management of the land to provide an ecologically rich landscape and how these differ to those of non- Aboriginal people and western science.  

Without the recognition of these differences, and the acknowledgment of what drives these inputs to produce the outputs and the maintenance of such a biologically diverse and intact landscape, the end result will be species loss as well as the loss of Aboriginal peoples knowledge and its positive application in the landscape.