My publications and reports, each linked with accompanying PDFs, preprints, and/or news pieces. See my CV for full list of publications and see here for my Research Themes.
Written by Oliver C. Stringham
Native species moved and traded as pets outside their natural range within Australia can become invasive just as readily as introduced non-native species. We show this domestic ‘within-country’ pet trade is a significant, under-recognized biosecurity risk that current invasive species policy largely overlooks.
Australia’s invasive plant regulations are set independently by each state and territory, producing inconsistent protections. We document the scale of these jurisdictional discrepancies and their implications for national efforts to prevent the spread of invasive plants across borders.
Despite a near-complete ban on exporting Australian wildlife, smuggling of Australian reptiles and amphibians into international trade continues largely unmonitored. We quantify the scale of this unregulated trade and highlight the gap between domestic protections and what is actually reaching overseas markets.
We developed an eDNA method — washing and filtering stored rice, then screening with qPCR — to detect khapra beetle, one of the world’s most damaging stored-product pests. The method detected a single larva within a 50 kg container of rice with 85–97%+ certainty, depending on the number of qPCR replicates run.
A policy piece in Science arguing that current European Union wildlife trade regulations leave major gaps that allow unsustainable and illegal trade to continue, and calling for reform to strengthen monitoring, enforcement, and species coverage.