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I graduated from James Cook
University in 2001, from the Department of Mathematical and
Physical Sciences. It was a blue-collar maths department, stoically
providing first and second-year mathematics training to hordes of
engineering students. The few mathematics students (there were only
four of us left by the time I graduated) leaned strongly towards
applied science as a result. A number of my lecturers, including my
father, were interested in biophysical oceanography, and that's where I
found myself during my honours year. My thesis focused on identifying
patterns in coral reef fish connectivity, and after submitting it, I
spent a couple of years pretending I wasn't desperately keen on being
an academic. I taught English overseas for a year, and then I worked
for a while as Sean
Connolly's research assistant back in Townsville. Eventually,
however, I applied for grad school at the University of Queensland. I completed my PhD in the Mathematics
Department in 2007, supervised by Hugh Possingham
and Kevin Burrage. I
am currently working with the Applied
Environmental Decision Analysis group at the University of Melbourne. We have a few
core topics, and I'm most interested in spatial
prioritisation. I sometimes drift towards less-applied ecology, and
particularly towards
coral reef ecosystems. I started with
some work on the population dynamics of coral reef fish
metapopulations, which I am still a little involved with, but I'm also
doing some work on Pleistocene coral communities in the Caribbean, and
the evolutionary behaviour of broadcast spawning organisms. Current ResearchPublicationsCurrent ResearchMy current research fits ever-so-neatly into three categories: 1.
Return on Investment Over the past few years,
the language of conservation planning has begun to include
"return-on-investment"
(ROI), in addition to the traditional systematic conservation planning.
The
old and new approaches share much in common (the traditional approaches
are arguably special types of ROI), but the way we tend to frame and
think about
ROI encourages the inclusion of important factors such as
ecological
and threat dynamics, ecosystem services, and the feedback between
conservation actions and anthrogenic responses.
Most importantly, ROI is obsessed with the explicit inclusion of costs into conservation planning. I recently had a paper published in PNAS which argues that if we use an ROI framework, it doesn't really matter what taxa we use to measure biodiversity - the variation in the cost and threat data overpower the variation between taxa (Bode et al. 2008). I've also just had a paper accepted into conservation biology that details the benefits of applying an ROI framework to the building of biosecurity barriers - particular predator exclusion fences for threatened marsupial conservation. However, I'm currently of the opinion that we're currently incorporating economics in a simplistic manner. Conservation budgets aren't exogenously fixed facts, and conservation projects don't just cost money - they can also help managers to raise more money. The importance of such factors is relatively unknown, but I have a feeling that we will understand them better once we describe them mathematically. 2. Optimal
management and monitoring These topics share many
philosophical similarities, and both tend to use the same mathematical
techniques. Fundamentally, the two fields recognise that conservation
funding is almost always severely limited. That means that every
expensive action conservation managers take has to be justified -
particularly management and monitoring.
From the perspective of management, it is important to spend the limited money available on the most cost-effective interventions. This can be a complicated question to answer: although the cost of different actions can probably be determined quite directly, understanding the resultant benefits requires an understanding of how the system dynamics translate management actions into changes in the conservation objective. Hugh and I published a paper on this topic last year, detailing how one might go about optimally managing oscillation prone predator-prey ecosystems. The stochastic temporal evolution of even these simple ecosystems is not straightforward, and managers have to consider how actions now will affect the system in years to come. The paper was reviewed by a this blog, whose clear explanation of the paper is much less painful than reading the actual manuscript. This requirement is especially galling in the case of monitoring - on one hand, we certainly cannot make decisions without being informed. Indeed, actions based on a poor understanding of a situation may result in worse outcomes than inaction (see this paper by Paul Armsworth and others). Nevertheless, in a dynamic and stochastic conservation system, we can never know anything exactly -- the fog of uncertainty is never going to lift entirely. And information is not free -- the more money we spend trying to better understand our system, the less money is left over for acting on that information. What level of uncertainty can we tolerate? 3.
Marine ecology This is obviously an absolutely
enormous topic, and my involvement in it is very limited. I only use
such a broad heading because my interest in the subject is varied. My
interest has
mainly concerned coral reef fish metapopulation dynamics, with a focus
on connectivity -- this the
topic
that I did my Honours thesis on. That research focused on the
population dynamics of a large coral reef fish population spread
throughout the Great Barrier Reef. Based on bio-physical modelling
Maurice James did with my
dad, Lou
Mason and Paul
Armsworth (described
in Proceedings of the Royal Society B in 2002), I was able to show
that the dispersal structure
of reef fish populations in the old Cairns management region of the
Great Barrier Reef (CNS) was unusually compartmentalised, and could be
arranged in
a regional "source-sink" manner. This arrangement involved a large
group of reefs in the north of
the CNS sending larvae unidirectionally to a large group of reefs in
the south - an larval exchange pattern with considerable implications
for the population dynamics there. We published these
findings in MEPS in 2006.
Connectivity is thought to be very important process governing the population and genetic dynamics of metapopulations, particularly for coral reef fish (see this TrEE review). Abstractly, these metapopulations can be thought of as networks (an idea first outlined by Urban & Keitt in 2001), an approach which might offer insights useful from ecological and conservation perspectives. The heterogeneous spatial arrangement of the patches, and the complicated interaction between the migrating individuals and the landscapes through which they move is likely to generate complex connectivity patterns - some patches will be connected by pathways of exceptional strength, for example. Other patches will not be connected at all. Sometimes the connection between a pair of patches will be stronger in one direction than the other -- it will be asymmetric. Hugh Possingham, Kevin Burrage and I have recently had a paper on this subject come out in Ecological Modelling. More recently, I've been involved in some work with Dustin Marshall on the evolutionary dynamics of marine broadcast spawners. We had a paper published in Evolution last year on the effects of sexual competition on sperm broadcast strategies. (While I found the application interesting, it also turned out to be an excellent introduction into game theory, which I think has extraordinary untapped potential in conservation biology.) Publications
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