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Representation does not necessarily reduce threats to biodiversity: Australia’s Commonwealth marine protected area system, 2012–2018

Recent revisions of Australia’s National Representative System of Marine Protected Areas (NRSMPA) have further biased protection of biodiversity away from commercially useful waters, thereby forgoing another opportunity for large-scale marine conservation. The NRSMPA includes State, Territory, and Commonwealth MPAs, with the latter component undergoing significant revisions from 2012, to 2015 and 2018 (Figure 1). Figure … Continue reading Representation does not necessarily reduce threats to biodiversity: Australia’s Commonwealth marine protected area system, 2012–2018

Seminar: Protected areas as “worthless lands” 9 Sep 2021

Thursday September 9th 1PM (AEST) Zoom Meeting ID: 8822 8757 7480 Password: 790662 https://jcu.zoom.us/j/82287577480 Abstract: This presentation reports on a journal paper being drafted that has been around 10 years in the making. I set out a long time ago to settle the arguments around protected areas being residual to extractive uses and therefore of limited value in … Continue reading Seminar: Protected areas as “worthless lands” 9 Sep 2021

A retrospective: what were the reasons for the success of the Great Barrier Reef rezoning?

The Great Barrier Reef (GBR) rezoning over the period 1999-2004 provides a valuable case study of effective environmental policy reform. Such real-world examples of policy reform at an ecosystem-wide scale are rare, and there were no precedents for this complex policy process. Nevertheless, a successful and transformative policy reform was achieved for the entire GBR, … Continue reading A retrospective: what were the reasons for the success of the Great Barrier Reef rezoning?

How recreational fishing can contribute to conservation of coastal ecosystems

An old fable tells of the five developmental stages an angler: 1, a young person with a budding interest in fishing just wants to catch a fish; 2, after having experienced catching fish, the angler seeks to catch many fish in an outing to achieve success; 3, having learned to catch many fish, the angler’s … Continue reading How recreational fishing can contribute to conservation of coastal ecosystems

New paper: Biophysical and anthropogenic influences on the status of Tonga’s coral reefs and reef fish fishery

Tonga’s coral reefs are increasingly threatened by both local (e.g. overfishing and pollution), and global (e.g. climate change) impacts. However, there is very little information on the current status of their coral reefs, or what the main threats are, and it is very difficult to manage and conserve an ecosystem for which there is little … Continue reading New paper: Biophysical and anthropogenic influences on the status of Tonga’s coral reefs and reef fish fishery

New paper: Community management yields positive impacts for coastal fisheries resources and biodiversity conservation

Implementing no-take reserves may benefit marine ecosystems, but at the potential cost of the fishers they displace. Combining no-take areas with areas of exclusive fishing access could provide the required incentives for community management to achieve positive impacts. However, not many protected areas have been assessed for their impact, which involves applying counterfactual thinking to … Continue reading New paper: Community management yields positive impacts for coastal fisheries resources and biodiversity conservation

New paper: Residual marine protected areas five years on: are we still favouring ease of establishment over need for protection?

Following his sabbatical year in our research group, Rodolphe Devillers (Canada) worked with us on a study of the distribution of marine protected areas in relation to fishing and oil and gas activities. This work, published in 2015, confirmed a tendency of MPAs to be ‘residual’, or created in places of low economic interest, often … Continue reading New paper: Residual marine protected areas five years on: are we still favouring ease of establishment over need for protection?

New paper: Integrating dynamic processes into waterfowl conservation prioritization tools

Conservation planning has typically used long-term averages to represent species’ distributions. However, this approach risks overlooking important spatial and temporal variation that might prove important for the persistence of populations. In our recently published paper in Diversity and Distributions, led by Kaylan Kemink, we assessed how much variability an averaged conservation tool might overlook if applied … Continue reading New paper: Integrating dynamic processes into waterfowl conservation prioritization tools

Technological advances allow for the first look at what lives in the deep Coral Sea, and why it matters for conservation

Conservation decisions are based on biodiversity information: the number of species that live in an area, their abundances and distributions, and the threats that might cause their decline or extinction. Therefore, it is challenging to make informed conservation decisions if biodiversity information is limited. In the deep ocean, biodiversity data are very sparse. Most of … Continue reading Technological advances allow for the first look at what lives in the deep Coral Sea, and why it matters for conservation