Research
Landscape Ecology & Ecosystem Services
We are interested in how landscape and climate change drivers determine species’ distributions, the structure of ecological communities and ecosystem service provision. We work at a range of scales from fine scale analyses in urban neighbourhoods to broad-scale global patterns and processes. The approach we take to this is to combine empirical data with state-of-the-art statistical and processes based models to develop understanding of impacts and predictive models to assess impacts.
Environmental Decision-making & Policy
The overarching aims of our work is highly applied so it is critical that we make our science as relevant as possible for decisions makers. We do this is to explicitly link models of ecosystem change to decision-making to inform conservation decisions. We work closely with end-users to clearly define decision problems and use predictive models assess the consequences of alternative actions for conservation outcomes. However, we are also interested in how alternative decisions influence the trade-offs between biodiversity outcomes and other societal objectives such as economic and well-being outcomes. This sits at the interface between ecological, social and economic sciences and is therefore naturally interdisciplinary.
Monitoring & Value of Information
A critically important question for conservation biology is the extent to which we should invest in conservation action now, versus investing in learning about the system of interest, so that we can make better decisions in the future. We work on a range of questions related to understanding the value of new information for conservation decision-making. A novel angle to our work is not simply considering learning about ecological systems, but also considering the value of learning about social and economic aspects critical for conservation decision-making.
