Valerie Hagger is a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Queensland. Her research interests include ecological and socioeconomic interactions in ecological restoration, biodiversity conservation and climate change.  Valerie works on an ARC linkage project, “Unlocking the secrets of mangrove conservation and restoration success”, with The University of Queensland and CSIRO and partners at The Nature Conservancy, and South East Queensland Healthy Land and Water. The project aims to identify social-economic, political and ecological conditions that enable effective conservation and restoration of mangroves over global and regional spatial scales.

Valerie’s PhD research project investigated the costs and success of ecological restoration in Australia and the potential for achieving multiple outcomes for biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration. More specifically it involved identifying the motivations for undertaking restoration, analysing the factors influencing the success of restoration from planning to monitoring/evaluation, assessing the cost-effectiveness of different restoration methods for Australia’s broad vegetation types, and identifying the links between biodiversity and socioeconomic outcomes in restoration projects. Her project has been awarded an Australian Postgraduate Award (APA) and a CSIRO Integrated Natural Resource Management (INRM) Postgraduate Award, and was supervised by Dr Kerrie Wilson (UQ) and Dr John Dwyer (UQ and CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences).

Valerie is an experienced terrestrial ecologist with 12 years ecological and environmental consulting experience for a range of industries (including government, Defence, mining, transport, water, energy and communications). She has been involved in 53 ecological projects, and was the project manager of ten of those. She was also the ecology team leader/manager.

Valerie is the Student and Early Career Representative of the Society of Ecological Restoration Australasia (SERA).

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Queensland, January 2020 – current

PhD Candidate, University of Queensland, May 2014 – January 2020

Master of Science (Conservation Biology), University of Queensland, July 2011

Email: v.hagger@uq.edu.au

Themes and Projects

Restoration Prioritisation

Publications

Hagger V., Wilson K., England J.R., Dwyer, J. M. 2019. Water availability drives aboveground biomass and bird richness in forest restoration plantings to achieve carbon and biodiversity cobenefits. Ecology and Evolution. 9(24):11379-14393. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.5874

Jellinek, S., Wilson, K., Hagger, V., Mumaw, L., Cooke, B., Guerrero, A., Zamin, T., Waryszak, P., Erickson, T., Standish, R. 2019. Integrating diverse social and ecological motivations to achieve landscape restoration. Journal of Applied Ecology. 56(1):246-252. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.13248

Hagger, V., Dwyer, J., Shoo, L. and Wilson, K. 2018. Use of seasonal forecasting to manage weather risk in ecological restoration. 28(7):1797-1807. Ecological Applications. https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.1769

Hagger, V., Dwyer, J. and Wilson, K. 2017. What motivates ecological restoration? Restoration Ecology. 25(5): 832-843. http://doi.org/10.1111/rec.12503

Hagger, V., Fisher, D., Schmidt, S. and Blomberg, S. 2013. Assessing the vulnerability of an assemblage of subtropical rainforest vertebrate species to climate change in south-east Queensland. Austral Ecology, 38 (4): 465-475.