Hugh P Possingham

The University of Queensland | UQ · School of Biological Sciences

Animal‐borne telemetry has revolutionized our ability to study animal movement, species physiology, demography and social structures, changing environments and the threats that animals are experiencing. While there will always be a need for basic ecological research and discovery, the current conservation crisis demands we look more pragmatically a...

Species sensitivity to forest fragmentation varies latitudinally, peaking in the tropics. A prominent explanation for this pattern is that historical landscape disturbance at higher latitudes has removed fragmentation-sensitive species or promoted the evolution of more resilient survivors. However, it is unclear whether this so-called extinction fi...

Nature‐based solutions (NbS) can prevent further climate change and increase local communities' capacity to adapt to the current impacts of climate change. However, the benefits obtained from implementing NbS are not distributed equally across people. Thus, it is key to further understand how people are impacted when implementing NbS. We developed...

Societal Impact Statement Plants are fundamental to terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and are key to human livelihoods. To protect plant diversity, systematic approaches to conservation assessment are needed. Many nations have legislation or other policy instruments that seek to protect biodiversity (including plants), and species‐level assessment...

Free access link until April 28, 2023: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1gjBLcZ3WyGWm Ecosystem restoration conventionally focuses on ecological targets. However, while ecological targets are crucial to mobilizing political, social, and financial capital, they do not encapsulate the need to: integrate social, economic, and ecological dimensions and...

Context Coastal and estuarine finfish species are responding to human-induced climate change by altering their distributions. In tropical regions, the species mostly affected by warming have limited acclimation capacity or live close to their upper thermal limits. Consequently, coastal fish assemblages may dramatically contract in range, experience...

The planet is facing climate and biodiversity loss crises that impact all of humanity and yet globally, women remain underrepresented in leading solutions to these urgent conservation challenges. As one of the world’s largest conservation non-profit organizations, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) provided a large case-study for understanding inequity f...

Protected areas are a key instrument for conservation. Despite this, they are vulnerable to risks associated with weak governance, land‐use intensification, and climate change. We used a novel hierarchical optimization approach to identify priority areas for expanding the global protected area system that explicitly accounted for such risks while m...

Political will is a critical determinant of the success or failure of environmental policies and interventions. Harnessing the political will necessary to implement environmental solutions can be challenging because environmental priorities may compete with other societal interests in policymaking. Environmental solutions are more politically feasi...

Synthesis research in ecology and environmental science improves understanding, advances theory, identifies research priorities, and supports management strategies by linking data, ideas, and tools. Accelerating environmental challenges increases the need to focus synthesis science on the most pressing questions. To leverage input from the broader...

Antarctic terrestrial biodiversity faces multiple threats, from invasive species to climate change. Yet no large-scale assessments of threat management strategies exist. Applying a structured participatory approach, we demonstrate that existing conservation efforts are insufficient in a changing world, estimating that 65% (at best 37%, at worst 97%...

Australia's national environmental legislation, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act) has been criticized for failing to mitigate the national extinction crisis. Under the EPBC Act, projects anticipated to have a significant impact on protected matters must be referred to the Australian Government for assessme...

Protected areas are a key instrument for conservation. Despite this, they are vulnerable to risks associated with weak governance, land use intensification, and climate change. Using a novel hierarchical optimization approach, we identified priority areas for expanding the global protected area system to explicitly account for such risks whilst max...

Forest restoration has been proposed as a scalable nature-based solution to achieve global environmental and socio-economic outcomes and is central to many policy initiatives, such as the Bonn Challenge. Restored forests contain appreciable biodiversity, improve habitat connectivity and sequester carbon. Incentive mechanisms (e.g. payments for ecos...

Monitoring is critical to assess management effectiveness, but broadscale systematic assessments of monitoring to evaluate and improve recovery efforts are lacking. We compiled 1808 time series from 71 threatened and near‐threatened terrestrial and volant mammal species and subspecies in Australia (48% of all threatened mammal taxa) to compare rela...

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service oversees the recovery of many species protected by the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA). Recent research suggests that a structured approach to allocating conservation resources could increase recovery outcomes for ESA listed species. Quantitative approaches to decision support can efficiently allocate limited fi...

Most protected area (PA) planning aims to improve biota representation within the PA system, but this does not necessarily achieve the best outcomes for biota retention across regions when we also consider areas outside the PA system. Here we assess the implications that different PA expansion strategies can have on the retention of species habitat...

Among the conservation community, it is well known that Earth’s mass species extinction crisis is getting worse. Yet, an often neglected problem is the need for effectively communicating the species extinction crisis to diverse audiences in ways that catalyse immediate action. Here we generated a streamlined threatened species recovery report card...

Global land use change has resulted in the loss and fragmentation of habitats and amplified the pace of species extinction. With carnivores being disproportionately at risk of range contraction, restoration is an important strategy to counter the impacts of habitat loss and fragmentation. While protection of public lands has been the cornerstone of...

Connectivity underpins the persistence of life; it needs to inform biodiversity conservation decisions. Yet, when prioritising conservation areas and developing actions, connectivity is not being operationalised in spatial planning. The challenge is the translation of flows associated with connectivity into conservation objectives that lead to acti...

In the summer of 2019–2020, southern Australia experienced the largest fires on record, detrimentally impacting the habitat of native species, many of which were already threatened by past and current anthropogenic land use. A large-scale restoration effort to improve degraded species habitat would provide fire-affected species with the chance to r...

The biodiversity and climate crises require diverse solutions, yet peer reviewed literature is dominated by men from the Global North. The Nature Conservancy (TNC), as one of the world's largest conservation non‐profit organizations, provides a case study to better understand how women publish relative to men in conservation science. By examining a...

Ambitious conservation efforts are needed to stop the global biodiversity crisis. In this study, we estimate the minimum land area to secure important biodiversity areas, ecologically intact areas, and optimal locations for representation of species ranges and ecoregions. We discover that at least 64 million square kilometers (44% of terrestrial ar...

Establishing marine reserves is particularly challenging in highly populated coastal areas where stakeholders compete for resources and space, such as the Mediterranean Sea. While large-scale conservation planning is useful, there is a need for finer-grained assessments at local and regional scales. Yet fine scale environmental and socioeconomic da...

Due to climate change, megafires are increasingly common and have sudden, extensive impacts on many species over vast areas, leaving decision makers uncertain about how best to prioritize recovery. We devised a decision‐support framework to prioritize conservation actions to improve species outcomes immediately after a megafire. Complementary locat...

Marine species are moving rapidly in response to warming, often in different directions and with variations dependent on location and depth. Given the current impetus to increase the area of protected ocean to 30%, conservation planning must include the 64% of the ocean beyond national jurisdictions, which in turn requires associated design challen...

Fish conservation in estuaries is complex because there are diverse social values and interests associated with estuarine ecosystems and multiple ecological processes (e.g., nursery, connectivity, and population dynamics). Furthermore, ontogenetic shift has an important role in determining fish habitat use (e.g. pelagic vs benthic environments), an...

Marine-protected areas are designated to reduce anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity and enhance fish production, but other ecological processes are inadequately accommodated in plans for coastal and marine ecosystems. We conducted a quantitative systematic literature review and meta-analysis on how researchers and decision-makers include ecologic...

Conservation strategies are rarely systematically evaluated, which reduces transparency, hinders the cost-effective deployment of resources, and hides what works best in different contexts. Using data on the iconic and critically endangered orangutan (Pongo spp.), we developed a novel spatiotemporal framework for evaluating conservation investments...

Scientific knowledge and advances are a cornerstone of modern society. They improve our understanding of the world we live in and help us navigate global challenges including emerging infectious diseases, climate change and the biodiversity crisis. However, there is a perpetual challenge in translating scientific insight into policy. Many articles...

Habitat loss is driving the extirpation of fauna across Earth. Many species are now absent from vast areas where they once occurred in inhabited continents, yet we do not have a good understanding of the extent to which different species have been extirpated, nor the degree to which range contractions and habitat loss has contributed to this local...

Increasingly, government and corporate policies on ecological compensation (e.g., offsetting) are requiring “net gain” outcomes for biodiversity. This presents an opportunity to align development with the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity Post‐2020 Global Biodiversity Framework's (GBF) proposed ambition for overall biodiversity reco...

Deciding when to protect threatened species habitat when complete knowledge about the habitat extent is uncertain is a common problem in conservation. More accurate habitat mapping improves conservation outcomes once that habitat is protected. However, delaying protection to improve accuracy can lead to species decline or, at worst, local extinctio...

Climate-smart conservation addresses the vulnerability of biodiversity to climate change impacts but may require transboundary considerations. Here, we adapt and refine 16 biophysical guidelines for climate-smart marine reserves for the transboundary California Bight ecoregion. We link several climate-adaptation strategies (e.g., maintaining connec...

Conservation decision-makers and practitioners increasingly strive for efficient and equitable outcomes for people and nature. However, environmental management programs commonly benefit some groups of people more than others, and very little is known about how efforts to promote equality (i.e., even distributions) and equity (i.e., proportional di...

With the intention of securing industry‐free land and seascapes, protecting wilderness entered international policy as a formal target for the first time in the zero draft of the Post‐2020 Global Biodiversity Framework under the Convention on Biological Diversity. Given this increased prominence in international policy, it is timely to consider the...

Biodiversity conservation decisions are difficult, especially when they involve differing values, complex multidimensional objectives, scarce resources, urgency, and considerable uncertainty. Decision science embodies a theory about how to make difficult decisions and an extensive array of frameworks and tools that make that theory practical. We so...

Advances in spatial biodiversity science and nationally available data have enabled the development of indicators that report on biodiversity outcomes, account for uneven global biodiversity between countries, and provide direct planning support. We urge their inclusion in the post-2020 global biodiversity framework.

Determining where environmental management is best applied, either through regulating single sectors of human activities or across sectors, is complicated by interactions between human impacts and the environment. In this article, we show how an explicit representation of human-environment interactions can help, via “impact networks” including acti...

Rhino poaching continues to threaten species survival despite decades‐long trade bans, with rhino horn use in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) contributing to global demand. Conservationists have debated over policy alternatives like trade legalization, and insight into TCM stakeholders is needed to support policymaking. The need for more researc...

The rise in global commitments to restore habitat underlines its importance to halt biodiversity loss and abate climate change. To effectively plan for landscape‐scale restoration efforts, decision makers need to prioritise where restoration should occur and have a method to estimate its cost. Here, we describe a systematic approach to determine wh...

Protected areas remain a key tool in the fight against biodiversity loss and have expanded rapidly in recent decades. However, protected areas are also increasingly experiencing downsizing events that reduce the total amount of area legally under protection. Here we explore how future predicted protected area expansion and downsizing (by 2045) will...

Land use change drives significant declines in ecosystem services globally. However, we currently lack an understanding of how and where different beneficiaries of ecosystem services experience the impacts of land use change. This information is needed to identify possible inequalities in the delivery among beneficiaries, and to design policy inter...

Wetlands are one of the most biologically productive ecosystems. Wetland ecosystem services, ranging from provision of food security to climate change mitigation, are enormous, far outweighing those of dryland ecosystems per hectare. However, land use change and water regulation infrastructure have reduced connectivity in many river systems and wit...

Climate change is redistributing terrestrial and marine biodiversity and altering fundamental ecological interactions. To conserve biodiversity and promote its long‐term persistence, protected areas should account for the ecological implications of species’ redistribution. Data paucity across many systems means that achieving this goal requires gen...

Increasingly, government and corporate policies on ecological compensation (e.g. offsetting) are requiring ‘net gain’ outcomes for biodiversity. This presents an opportunity to align development with the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework’s (GBF) ambition for overall biodiversity recovery. In t...

17% of land and 7% of seas are now protected, but further expansion of protected and conserved areas is embedded within the post-2020 global biodiversity framework. It is time to set meaningful indicators to guide improvement in both the quantity and quality of protected areas in the coming decade.

Spatial prioritization is a critical step in conservation planning, a process designed to ensure that limited resources are applied in ways that deliver the highest possible returns for biodiversity and human wellbeing. In practice, many spatial prioritizations fall short of their potential by focusing on places rather than actions, and by using da...

Kelp forests are globally important and highly productive ecosystems, yet their persistence and protection in the face of climate change and human activity are poorly known. Here, we present a 35-year time series of high-resolution satellite imagery that maps the distribution and persistence of giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) forests along ten de...

The Convention on Biological Diversity’s post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework will probably include a goal to stabilize and restore the status of species. Its delivery would be facilitated by making the actions required to halt and reverse species loss spatially explicit. Here, we develop a species threat abatement and restoration (STAR) metric...

Reassembling ecological communities and rebuilding habitats through active restoration treatments require curating the selection of plant species to use in seeding and planting mixes. Ideally, these mixes should be assembled based on attributes that support ecosystem function and services, promote plant and animal species interactions and ecologica...

Protected areas are important for preventing biodiversity declines, yet indicators of species' trends in protected areas rarely include threatened species. We use data from the first national Threatened Species Index developed in Australia to report on trends for threatened and near‐threatened birds inside and outside terrestrial and marine protect...

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03496-1.

Marine species are moving rapidly in response to warming, often in different directions and with variations by location and depth. This poses challenges to conventional reserve design. We develop a three-dimensional planning approach for the high seas that conserves biodiversity, minimises exposure to climate change, retains species within reserve...