NOTE: THIS EVENT IS ALSO AVAILABLE ONLINE.
Register and the Microsoft Teams meeting link to join online will be provided in your 'Registration Confirmation' email.
Faith Coleman (Delta Environmental Consulting)
Faith Coleman is an estuarine ecologist with over 30 years of experience working in Australia and around the world.
Faith specializes in historical and microbiological ecology in diverse wet, salty, and muddy environments. She collaborates with fishermen, salt producers, traditional owners, community groups, and local authorities to protect and restore previously productive habitats.
Faith is often called in after major algae blooms, which tend to prompt local caretakers to seek expert help.
As a result, she has learnt more about the causes, triggers, and solutions for algae blooms than any ecologist really wants to know.
Faith Coleman (ABC News: Che Chorley)Leo Tolstoy famously wrote in Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
This idea inspired what’s now called the Anna Karenina Principle, popularised by geographer Jared Diamond. In simple terms: for any system (a family, business, or ecosystem) to flourish, all its key parts must work well together.
If even one piece fails, the whole thing can unravel in its own unique (and sometimes spectacular) fashion.
In ecosystems, these key parts include connections, balanced functions, low stress, and a web of feedback loops that keep everything stable.
The Anna Karenina Principle applies to aquatic ecosystems too: when just one thing goes wrong, the result can be a dramatic (and sometimes toxic) algae bloom.
In her presentation talk, Faith will dive into examples of algae blooms in Oceania’s waters (like the SA Karenia bloom), long-term drivers, what triggers them, and how we might help our aquatic environments become a bit more like Tolstoy’s “happy families”—balanced, resilient, and thriving.