Practical, powerful and cost effective indicators of sustainable forest management for the conservation of biological diversity. Much debate about appropriate use of Australia's forests stems from uncertainty about the magnitude of impacts on abundances and distributions of forest-dependent species, a key indicator of sustainable management under the Montreal Process. An opportunity exists to develop new tools to substantially improve our ability to detect and assess change. This project will de ....Practical, powerful and cost effective indicators of sustainable forest management for the conservation of biological diversity. Much debate about appropriate use of Australia's forests stems from uncertainty about the magnitude of impacts on abundances and distributions of forest-dependent species, a key indicator of sustainable management under the Montreal Process. An opportunity exists to develop new tools to substantially improve our ability to detect and assess change. This project will develop optimal monitoring design and analysis strategies for detecting population trends against a background of natural fluctuation and observation error. It will result in templates for coherent reporting on indicators at regional and national levels. It will exploit recent findings regarding observation error in surveys, advances in statistical control processes, simulation methods, and power analysis to develop a world-class species monitoring system.Read moreRead less
Reimagining the Australian Suburb: Biodiversity planning in urban fringe landscapes. Over 40% of nationally listed threatened ecological communities occur in urban areas. Accelerating urbanisation in Australia is considered one of the greatest threats to biodiversity. This threat will increase without a more strategic approach to conservation planning in urban environments. Protection of biodiversity in urban areas brings numerous societal benefits but involves complicated tradeoffs between com ....Reimagining the Australian Suburb: Biodiversity planning in urban fringe landscapes. Over 40% of nationally listed threatened ecological communities occur in urban areas. Accelerating urbanisation in Australia is considered one of the greatest threats to biodiversity. This threat will increase without a more strategic approach to conservation planning in urban environments. Protection of biodiversity in urban areas brings numerous societal benefits but involves complicated tradeoffs between competing land uses including housing development, agricultural production and conservation. This project builds on recent advancements in ecological modelling and mathematical optimisation to develop and test tools to facilitate transparent decisions based on optimal trade-offs between competing values. It will result in a more strategic approach to planning conservation in urban environments.Read moreRead less
Testing the utility of habitat models in making conservation planning decisions. Habitat models are used in conservation decisions. The aim of this project is to develop a system for assessing models that explicitly tests and demonstrates the link between model reliability and planning outcome. This research is significant because it will explore the importance of a suite of implicit assumptions that underlie current approaches to conservation planning in Australia and internationally. The resul ....Testing the utility of habitat models in making conservation planning decisions. Habitat models are used in conservation decisions. The aim of this project is to develop a system for assessing models that explicitly tests and demonstrates the link between model reliability and planning outcome. This research is significant because it will explore the importance of a suite of implicit assumptions that underlie current approaches to conservation planning in Australia and internationally. The results of this research will provide natural resource managers and planners with a protocol for evaluating the reliability of the habitat maps at their disposal, and their utility in supporting decisions involving the allocation of land to different uses.Read moreRead less