Research Interests
Historically, my research interests have focused on the dynamics of declining species; and particularly in expanding the focus of conservation studies to include interactions with other species present in the habitat, including human resource users. More specifically I have been interested in how competition, predation, and disease affect declining populations, and how the spatial structure of the habitat might intensify or ameliorate these effects. I study these interactions in two types of systems, those recently fragmented by humans and in naturally patchy habitats. One of the fundamental uncertainties in conservation biology at the moment, at least in terrestrial environments, is how our rapid fragmentation of historically contiguous habitats will affect species populations and interactions. Only by studying species in both recently fragmented and naturally patchy systems can we understand how processes will change with fragmentation and what the ultimate endpoint might be.
More recently my focus has shifted to include fisheries and marine resource management. With the expanding focus on sustainable development and its application to fisheries policies, there are many issues that cross over the traditional divide between conservation biology and fisheries management. Despite widespread persecutions that many marine species, and particularly migratory pelagic species, are panmictic, there is increasingly strong evidence that many of these species utilize particular habitat features such as seamounts, and may have strong divisions between populations due to bathymetric or oceanographic features. Thus many of the ecological concepts originally developed in terrestrial contexts, such as metapopulations, may be very useful in understanding the dynamics of marine species and developing management that can address their dynamics in a spatial context. Developing a clear understanding of spatial population dynamics and movement behavior in marine systems will be increasing important as fisheries managers attempt to integrate marine protected areas and space-time closures into traditional fisheries management frameworks.
My research addresses these issues using an integrated approach that combines modeling, empirical investigations, and analysis of historical data. In this framework, modeling can summarize and guide empirical investigations and empirical work can stimulate new modeling approaches, leading to a more complete solution for the conservation problem at hand and deeper mechanistic understanding of the system. I have used a variety of modeling methods in this context, including diffusion approximations, birth-death process models, projection matrices, individual-based models, and simulation models.
I am also interested in developing ecologically based policy tools that can resolve the inherent conflicts between human resource use and species persistence. My work in this area focuses on integrating economics and ecological dynamics to look for solutions that allow limited resource extraction that is both economically efficient and ecologically sustainable in the long term.
Current Projects
- Bayesian framework for metapopulation dynamics of species in endangered communities: integrating demographic, environmental and genetic data
- Spatial management for sustainable fisheries: a framework and application to target and bycatch species in Australia 's Eastern Tuna and Billfish Fishery
- Compensatory mitigation: an economically efficient solution for marine conservation and management of fisheries impacts
- Predicting catch rates for non-target species in industrial fisheries: resolving the problem of unobserved effort
- Developing an adaptive sampling framework for gathering fisheries independent data: allocating effort under uncertainty
- Predicting the impact of introduced species: an analysis of extinction rates for island endemics
- Methods for incorporating uncertainty in inference and decision-making: application of dempster-shafer theory, information gap decision theory, and probability bounds analysis to resource management problems.
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