Author: Bob Pressey

The Great Barrier Reef, in northern Queensland, is a national and international icon, its significance recognised by World Heritage listing. The Reef has its own dedicated agency to oversee management and avoid adverse impacts from development. The sources of these impacts are diverse, ranging from coastal development and shipping, fishing, catchment land uses, and global warming. The … Continue reading Inadequate protection of the Great Barrier Reef, and where to from here?

Fisheries bycatch can result in significant biomass removal of protected and vulnerable species, leading to population decline and increased extinction risk. A principal role of marine protected areas (MPAs) is to prevent biodiversity loss, so it is important to test the ability of MPAs to mitigate bycatch. In a new paper authored by Heather Welch … Continue reading Assessing bycatch threats to mobile marine species and evaluating the effectiveness of marine protected areas

Rafael Magris is lead author on a new study just out in the journal Diversity reporting on a risk assessment of the coral reefs in Brazil. The study mapped out the geographic patterns of exposure of reefs to a range of stressors: fishing, land-based pollution, mining, shipping movements, coastal development, aquaculture, and global warming. By accounting … Continue reading Cumulative human impacts on Brazilian coral reefs

Management of the Great Barrier Reef's catchments is vital to improving water quality of the Reef. Investments in management of these cathments in recent decades total hundreds of millions of dollars, but measurable improvements have been slight. One reason is that the complex governance of the Reef and its catchments has failed in a number of ways. … Continue reading Governance failure limits water quality improvement for the Great Barrier Reef

Rafael Magris is lead author on a new paper published in Conservation Letters. The paper offers new insights into the design of marine protected areas. Currently much of the conservation planning literature uses one set of goals: either connectivity, demographic persistence, or representation of species. An analysis combining all three approaches was long overdue, so … Continue reading New paper: Biologically representative and well connected marine reserves enhance biodiversity persistence in conservation planning

Our five-year project on decision support for island management, in collaboration with managers in the Pilbara region, is now producing published papers. One of these, led by Amelia Wenger, is now available online. We consulted with managers and suppliers of material and services to estimate, across several hundred islands, costs related to labour, transport, consumables, … Continue reading New paper: Generic formulae for comprehensive estimation of costs to control invasive species, with application to north-western Australia

The Conservation Planning Group has a new paper published, titled "From displacement activities to evidence-informed decisions in conservation". The paper, authored by Bob Pressey, Rebecca Weeks, and Georgina Gurney, argues that much activity in conservation is focused on measures that fail to tell us how much difference we are making for biodiversity. This incorrect focus … Continue reading New paper: just how effective are science, policy, and management for protected areas?

A new paper in Conservation Letters reports on discussions from a workshop on conservation planning tools. The workshop, led by Mark Schwartz at the University of California Davis, involved experts in five different approaches to decision-making in conservation. The five approaches are: Strategic Foresight, Systematic Conservation Planning (SCP), Structured Decision Making, Open Standards for the … Continue reading New paper: decision-support frameworks and tools for conservation

Two years ago, Bob Pressey established a long-term collaboration with a research group led by Raphael Loyola at the Federal University of Goiás in Brazil. Rafael's group focuses on biogeography and conservation planning. One of our recent joint projects looked at the distribution and conservation of reptiles in Argentina, involving Raphael's colleague Javier Nori. A … Continue reading New paper: priority conservation areas for reptiles in Argentina, considering climate change and risk of land conversion