On the heels of fiery debate in Queensland regarding proposed changes to land clearing legislation in Parliament, researchers in the Wilson Lab have published a new study describing how land clearing patterns have changed alongside considerable fluctuations in the Vegetation Management Act. “Overall, landholders across Queensland have continued to select clearing locations that may be…
The benefits of increasingly popular citizen science programs extend well beyond helping researchers to collect data, a study has shown. University of Queensland researchers, working with organisations in the Reef Citizen Science Alliance, found that more than half the people attending a citizen science event were likely to adopt new actions to help reefs. Dr Angela…
Researchers from UQ, the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions (CEED), the National University of Singapore (NUS), and staff from the Singapore National Parks Board (NParks), met in Singapore on February 8-9 2018 with an aim to strengthen the collaborative links in conservation science between these institutions. Scientists and managers from NUS…
In conservation research focus group discussion is a widely used qualitative approach to gain an in-depth understanding of social issues. However, our study found that despite the growing popularity of the method conservation researchers do not adequately report on methodological choices from planning to data analysis. There is a lack of critical assessments of the…
Interviews are a widely used methodology in conservation research. However, researchers with natural science backgrounds have been criticised for poor and inadequate reporting on the application of the method. Our paper published in a Special Feature of Methods in Ecology and Evolution (January 2018) examines the use of interviews in conservation science. Led by Juliette…
Paper lead by honours student Brooke Williams has recently been published in the Journal of Applied Ecology. Fire management is an important aspect of ensuring the safety of Australians. It can be challenging due to many factors such as time and budget constraints, the possibility of a prescribed burn escaping, possible damage to the…
Clear objectives are a necessary prerequisite for efficient restoration, but restoration projects often concern numerous and diverse stakeholders with different objectives and different values. A recent publication led by CEED researcher Angela Guerrero demonstrates how restoration projects can integrate the values and preferences of multiple stakeholders. Using a case of restoration decision-making in southeast Queensland,…
An article by Valerie Hagger, John Dwyer and Kerrie Wilson ‘What motivates ecological restoration’ has been featured in Editor’s Picks for the September 2017 issue of Restoration Ecology. Hagger et al. surveyed 307 people involved in the restoration of native vegetation across Australia to identify their underlying motivations. The study found that biodiversity enhancement is the…
A recent publication led by PhD student Konrad Uebel demonstrates the additional ecological benefits arising from assisted regeneration and its potential as a cost-effective tool for accelerating forest recovery. By comparing two different levels of management intervention on abandoned agro-pastoral land, using a combination of field data and historical aerial imagery, the study reveals the differences in forest structure and…
Successful decision-making needs to predict the future. How can we do this best? In most cases, this is not easy: in biodiversity conservation, predicting future outcomes is complicated by complex ecological, economic, and social contexts. But these challenges do not negate the need for us to make these predictions when deciding what conservation interventions to…
