Global climate change is projected to increase the frequency and intensity of drought in dry regions. Severe drought can trigger tree death and drive persistent vegetation change. To date, most empirical studies have focused on drought-induced mortality of adult trees, but this needs to be matched by similar efforts to understand drought impacts on seedling […]
Conservation decision-makers constantly face a trade-off between spending limited funds on direct management action (doing something), or gaining new information in an attempt to improve management performance in the future (improving our knowledge). Value-of-information analysis can help to resolve this trade-off by evaluating how much management performance could improve if new information was gained. Value-of-information […]
Transdisciplinary research, involving close collaboration between researchers and the users of research, has been a feature of environmental problem solving for several decades, often spurred by the need to find negotiated outcomes to intractable problems. In 2005, the Australian Government allocated funding to its environment portfolio for public good research, which resulted in consecutive four-year […]
Below is an excerpt from the WWF report, Building Nature’s Safety Net 2014. It summarises the status of Australia’s National Reserve System (NRS) in terms of percentage cover and protection afforded to ecosystems and threatened species. Martin Taylor was the lead author of this report and he holds it up as important output from WWF […]
A set of techniques known as ‘qualitative modelling’ offers decision-makers a chance to forecast some of these negative outcomes before they happen, and to make decisions that avoid complex, negative management outcomes.
Four years ago, the NERP Landscapes and Policy Hub (a sister hub to NERP Environmental Decisions) set out to answer the question ‘How do we take a regional-scale view of biodiversity?’ The trigger for this question was the Hawke review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (1999). One of the questions facing the review was why, after 10 years of the Act being in operation, had the list of threatened and endangered species grown steadily to over 1,750 with precious few coming off that list. One of the review’s recommendations was to consider biodiversity at the scale of landscapes and whole regions as well as species and communities in order to understand and manage the underlying causes of decline.
How do conservation NGOs influence policy? There are many tactics and approaches to consider when seeking to create significant conservation outcomes but before I get into those I think it’s important to mention passion. Big wins don’t come without a campaign by people passionate about the result. Full stop. Conservation has only ever progressed because […]
So, how are we going in Australia when it comes to using long-term monitoring data to inform management decisions? You often hear that conservation management agencies fail to use scientific evidence to inform management but our investigation suggests this is not the case – though there is room for improvement.
Children understand trade-offs. Ask them if they would like to have more chocolate cake and more candy, and it’s a no-brainer. However, ask them if they would like more chocolate cake or more candy and they could deliberate for some time. Conservation decision-making is the same.
To be effective, species conservation should be collaborative. Ideally this would involve multiple parties across land management agencies, research institutions and the local community (see Decision Point #73 for stories on this theme). But how often are such groups formed, particularly for invertebrates? Can’t think of any? Well you wouldn’t be alone. Threatened invertebrates don’t get much press and even less active support.
The case of the Tasmanian Land Conservancy management endowment We often think of protected areas as pristine places that sustain rare and interesting species. It’s often true that an area is given protected status because it contains some natural value, like rare species, but what is frequently overlooked is the cost of sustaining those natural […]
The long term is a strange place. We live in the here-and-now but the long term stretches out into the distant future. Most of it lies over our individual event horizons, and many of the choices we make today aren’t taken with any consideration of what they mean for the long term. Environmental decision science […]