Heidi K Alleway

The Nature Conservancy

Food systems and the communities they support are increasingly challenged by climate change and the need to arrest escalating threats through mitigation and adaptation. To ensure climate change mitigation strategies can be implemented effectively and to support substantial gains in greenhouse gas emissions reduction, it is, therefore, valuable to u...

Achieving a sustainable socio-ecological future now requires large-scale environmental repair actioned across legislative borders. Yet, enabling large-scale conservation is complicated by policy-making processes that grapple with a disconnect between socio-economic interests and political priorities, multiple sources of knowledge, and differing app...

Oyster reefs are structurally complex habitats which are increasingly recognized for their importance in estuarine systems. With over 85% of oyster reefs lost to human activities globally, there is increasing interest in aquaculture to not only meet the growing need for food worldwide, but also enhance ecological functions and services. Prime among...

Investment in extractive or ‘non-fed’ aquaculture has been proposed as a partial solution for sustainable food provision. An important aspect is the potential for aquaculture-environment interactions to influence the provision of ecosystem services. Here, we quantify and monetise the impacts of bivalve and seaweed farming on a regulating service (r...

Aquaculture is a critical food source for the world's growing population, producing 52% of the aquatic animal products consumed. Marine aquaculture (mariculture) generates 37.5% of this production and 97% of the world's seaweed harvest. Mariculture products may offer a climate-friendly, high-protein food source, because they often have lower greenh...

Case studies in support of Caswell et al. 2020.

Aquaculture can have negative environmental impacts, adding to the suite of anthropogenic stressors that challenge coastal ecosystems. However, a growing body of scientific evidence indicates that the commercial cultivation of bivalve shellfish and seaweed can deliver valuable ecosystem goods and services, including provision of new habitats for fi...

Setting accomplishable goals for managing environmental health might be more effective where the environmental goals align with social interests. Engaging community stakeholders in the decision-making process allows social knowledge, expectations and concerns to inform planning. This inclusion reduces the risk of community or political backlash to...

• Bivalve habitat restoration is growing in geographic extent and scale globally. While addressing the wide‐scale loss of these biogenic habitats is still a key motivation behind restoration efforts, stakeholders and funders are increasingly drawn to shellfish restoration for the many ecosystem services these habitats provide. • There is clear evid...

The concept of ‘blue growth’, which aims to promote the growth of ocean economies whilst holistically managing marine socio-ecological systems, is emerging within national and international marine policy. The concept is often promoted as being novel, however, we show that, historical analogies exist which can provide insights for contemporary plann...

Reef ecosystems all over the world are in decline and managers urgently need information that can assess management interventions and set national conservation targets. We assess the conservation status and risk of ecosystem collapse for the Oyster Reef Ecosystem of Southern and Eastern Australia, which comprises two community sub-types established...

Aquaculture of bivalve shellfish and seaweed represents a global opportunity to simultaneously advance coastal ecosystem recovery and provide substantive benefits to humanity. To identify marine ecoregions with the greatest potential for development of shellfish and seaweed aquaculture to meet this opportunity, we conducted a global spatial analysi...

Environmental solutions require a decision-making process that is ultimately political, in that they involve decisions with uncertain outcomes and stakeholders with conflicting viewpoints. If this process seeks broad alignment between the government and public, then reconciling conflicting viewpoints is a key to the legitimacy of these decisions. W...

Marine aquaculture is growing quickly and has substantial effects on people and the environment. Existing research has demonstrated that marine aquaculture can contribute to ecosystem service provisioning that extends beyond production of a resource; however, the extent and significance of these goods and services are not well understood. Here we r...

As the world’s population continues to grow, the way in which ocean industries interact with ecosystems will be key to supporting the longevity of food and social securities. Aquaculture is crucial to the future supply of seafood, but challenges associated with negative impacts could impede increased production, especially production that is effici...

The human-mediated introduction of marine non-indigenous species is a centuries-if not millennia-old phenomenon, but was only recently acknowledged as a potent driver of change in the sea. We provide a synopsis of key historical milestones for marine bioinva-sions, including timelines of (a) discovery and understanding of the invasion process, focu...

We review the status of marine shellfish ecosystems formed primarily by bivalves in Australia, including: identifying ecosystem-forming species, assessing their historical and current extent, causes for decline and past and present management. Fourteen species of bivalves were identified as developing complex, three-dimensional reef or bed ecosyste...

Published research articles and reports on Australian shellfish ecosystem-forming species. See Table 2 for category codes. (DOCX)

Anthropogenic impacts have shifted aquatic ecosystems far from prehistoric baseline states; yet, understanding these impacts is impeded by a lack of available long-term data that realistically reflects the organisms and their habitats prior to human disturbance. Fish are excellent, and largely underused, proxies for elucidating the degree, directio...

The antiquity of human impact on ecosystems is increasingly understood, though the arrival of settlers to new lands remains a defining period. Colonization of the ‘neo-Europes’, a reference from the discipline of history, precipitated changes in aquatic ecosystems throughmodification ofwaterways and introductions of non-native species. We considere...

As a discipline, marine historical ecology (MHE) has contributed significantly to our understanding of the past state of the marine environment when levels of human impact were often very different from those today. What is less widely known is that insights from MHE have made headway into being applied within the context of present-day and long-te...

Marine historical research has made progress in bridging the gap between science and policy, but examples in which it has been effectively applied remain few. In particular, its application to aquaculture remains unexplored. Using actual examples of natural resource management in the state of South Australia, we illustrate how historical data of va...

Australians have a profound love for coastal and marine environments. Whilst iconic destinations such as the Great Barrier Reef, The Twelve Apostles and Rottnest Island annually attract millions of international visitors, Australians on weekends and over the summer holidays flock towards lesser-known, family destinations such as Lakes Entrance, Nam...

Oyster reefs form over extensive areas and the diversity and productivity of sheltered coasts depend on them. Due to the relatively recent population growth of coastal settlements in Australia, we were able to evaluate the collapse and extirpation of native oyster reefs (Ostrea angasi) over the course of a commercial fishery. We used historical rec...

The use of environmental DNA (eDNA) is a relatively new indirect method of species detection. It offers several advantages over traditional detection techniques such as its sensitivity and that it does not require capture, handling or direct observation of the species of interest. Despite the rising interest on utilising eDNA and its potential appl...

Decreases in the mean trophic level (MTL) of fishery catches have been used to infer reductions in the abundance of high trophic level species caused by fishing pressure. Previous assessments of southern Australian fisheries have been inconclusive. The objectives of the present study were to provide more accurate estimates of MTL using disaggregate...