Kerrie Ann Wilson

University of Queensland | UQ · School of Biological Sciences

Communities have a strong role in protecting biodiversity. In addition to participation in restoration, a range of actions in the public or private sphere may support biodiversity. Despite this, there is a lack of clarity about what actions should be prioritized for behavior change campaigns. We developed and applied a method to prioritize communit...

Marine invasive species (MIS) can cause irreparable change in new environments, though only 1 in 10 invasive species cause negative impacts to recipient ecosystems. Knowledge of which invasive species could have negative impacts helps ensure that limited resources available for MIS monitoring and management are deployed most effectively. This is pa...

Diverse solutions are needed to reduce human impacts on nature. Fostering individual stewardship behaviours that protect, restore, and encourage sustainable use of nature will need to be part of this mix of solutions. A key challenge then is how to increase the uptake of such behaviours. Social capital provides a framework to explore the diverse ty...

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...

The loss and degradation of nature can lead to hopelessness and despair, which may undermine engagement in conservation actions. Emerging movements, such as that behind the organization Conservation Optimism, aim to avert potential despair of those involved in conservation. Some argue that fostering positive states, such as hope or optimism, can mo...

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...

Natural soundscapes experienced in parks are increasingly recognised as a valuable ecosystem service, yet urban parks soundscapes also commonly contain anthropogenic noise. While studies show bird calls can promote psychological restoration, the factors that might influence actual experiences of these sounds by individuals in urban parks are less c...

Mangrove forests store high amounts of carbon, protect communities from storms, and support fisheries. Mangroves exist in complex social-ecological systems, hence identifying socioeconomic conditions associated with decreasing losses and increasing gains remains challenging albeit important. The impact of national governance and conservation polici...

It is increasingly recognised that efforts in sustainable development dealing with natural resources management must account not only for their ecological effectiveness, but also whether they achieve this in a socially beneficial and just manner. Studies on distributive social equity in sustainable natural resources management have often taken a li...

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...

This study applied MARXAN to identify cost-efficient areas for biodiversity protection, within the Thy National Park in Denmark. Public authorities have requested a more systematic approach to managing public land, which identifies cost-effective solutions and potential trade-offs between economic cost and biodiversity benefits. The aim of this stu...

Climate change is transforming the decision-making landscape for many conservation organizations. Conservation planning and implementation under climate change are challenging due to uncertainties about climate impacts and the effectiveness of adaptation options. Strategically building flexibility into conservation plans so they can be adjusted ove...

The global carbon sequestration and avoided emissions potentially achieved via blue carbon is high (∼3% of annual global greenhouse gas emissions); however, it is limited by multidisciplinary and interacting uncertainties spanning the social, governance, financial, and technological dimensions. We compiled a transdisciplinary team of experts to elu...

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...

A challenge for natural area managers is to ensure that public expenditure on land restoration is cost effective, efficient and transparent but this is difficult to achieve in practice, especially when there are many possible projects across multiple years. Here we develop a “roadmap” for investment in land restoration. It explicitly considers spac...

Strong trade-offs between agriculture and the environment occur in deforestation frontiers, particularly in the world's rapidly disappearing tropical and subtropical dry forests. Pathways to mitigate these trade-offs are often unclear, as well as how deforestation or different policies alter the option space of available pathways. Using a spatial o...

Peri-urban areas, defined as the region between urban and rural settlements, are heterogeneous, dynamic regions experiencing rapid land use change in cities around the world. Ongoing development and land use change has resulted in the fragmentation, degradation and loss of natural assets, threatening biodiversity, and ecosystems within the peri-urb...

The online version of the original article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03156-3

The continental shelf in the southwestern Atlantic Ocean is among the six richest marine regions for biodiversity in the Southern Hemisphere, and its subtropical region is one of the fastest-warming hotspots. Thus, climate change could profoundly affect future species distributions. We investigated future climate-induced changes in fish larvae and...

Aims To identify potential hull fouling marine invasive species that could survive in East Antarctica presently and in the future. Location Australia's Antarctic continental stations: Davis, Mawson and Casey, East Antarctica; and subantarctic islands: Macquarie Island and Heard and McDonald Islands. Methods Our study uses a novel machine‐learning...

The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil has emerged as the leading sustainability certification system to tackle socioenvironmental issues associated with the oil palm industry. However, the effectiveness of certification by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil in achieving its socioeconomic objectives remains uncertain. We evaluate the impact of...

Understanding how private landholders make deforestation decisions is of paramount importance for conservation. Numerous behavioural frameworks have sought to describe what influences intentions to perform pro-environmental behaviours. Particularly for on-farm conservation, it is unclear which frameworks best predict deforestation intentions under...

Understanding how private landholders make deforestation decisions is of paramount importance for conservation. Behavioural frameworks from the social sciences have a lot to offer researchers and practitioners, yet these insights remain underutilised in describing what drives landholders’ deforestation intentions under important political, social,...

The ecosystem services concept has come into wide use in conservation and natural resource management, partly due to its appeal as an anthropocentric rationale for protecting and restoring nature. Proponents of the ecosystem services concept expect that presenting these arguments alongside biodiversity arguments should lead to a broader base of sup...

Using data on the iconic orangutan (Pongo spp.), we developed a novel spatiotemporal framework for evaluating conservation investments. We show that around USD 1 billion was invested between 1999 and 2019 into orangutan conservation by governments, non-governmental organizations, companies and communities. Broken down by allocation to different con...

Coral reefs are one of the ecosystems most sensitive to climate change. The recent loss and degradation of coral reef ecosystems is expected to continue even if global warming is limited to 1.58C above pre-industrial levels. There is therefore an urgent need to develop new technologies and management approaches to coral reef conservation. Emerging...

Climate change is the most significant threat to the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). While Australians express appreciation and concern for the GBR, it is not clear whether they connect climate-related action with reef conservation. An online survey of 4,285 Australians asked “…what types of actions could people like you do that would be helpful for the...

Governance of the environment and natural resources involves interests of multiple stakeholders at different scales. In community-based forest management, organisations outside of communities play important roles in achieving multiple social and ecological objectives. How and when these organisations play a role in the community-based forest manage...

Voluntary private land conservation (PLC) is becoming an increasingly important complement to state protected areas around the world. PLC programs can serve as valuable strategies to increase biodiversity on agricultural lands, but their effectiveness depends on high participation rates. Amidst growing concerns regarding scalability and effectivene...

Participatory approaches to forest management have been promoted as a means of returning rights historically removed, and as a way of managing natural resources sustainably, fairly, and to improve livelihoods in communities. Top-down models of community-based forest management take the perspective that if people feel ownership over, have a voice in...

Climate change is impacting coral reefs now. Recent pan-tropical bleaching events driven by unprecedented global heat waves have shifted the playing field for coral reef management and policy. While best-practice conventional management remains essential, it may no longer be enough to sustain coral reefs under continued climate change. Nor will cli...

The increasing extent and frequency of fires globally requires nuanced understanding of the drivers of large-scale events for improved prevention and mitigation. Yet, the drivers of fires are often poorly understood by various stakeholders in spatially expansive and temporally dynamic landscapes. Further, perceptions about the main cause of fires v...

Active restoration is becoming an increasingly important conservation intervention to counteract the degradation of marine coastal ecosystems. Understanding what has motivated the scientific community to research the restoration of marine coastal ecosystems and how restoration research projects are funded is essential if we want to scale-up restora...

There is limited knowledge of the mechanisms that can inspire people's concern and engagement in the protection of unpopular and unappealing species. We analyzed Polish people's interest in themed internet memes featuring the proboscis monkey (Nasalis larvatus) and the consequences of this interest for conservation marketing. We examined Google Tre...

Most of Australia's native-forest vegetation is located on private land, and conservation success often depends on farmers' participation in bush management programmes. We surveyed 251 landholders within the Brigalow Belt bioregion of southeast Queensland and asked them to make pairwise comparisons of 10 non-financial incentives and one financial i...

Many tropical countries continue to devolve forest management to forest-dwelling communities. The assumption is that local knowledge of forests and community engagement in forest management will attain multiple social and environmental co-benefits, such as poverty alleviation and reduced deforestation and fires. Evidence for this, however, is scant...

The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) has emerged as the world’s largest sustainability standard to tackle social and environmental issues associated with the oil palm industry. To date, however, the effectiveness of RSPO certification remains uncertain, especially for socio-economic objectives. Here we evaluate the impact of certification...

Psychosocial factors determine individual and collective behaviours, and there is growing evidence of their influence on land management behaviours. Native vegetation management encompasses biophysical, economic, political, and cultural dimensions that are immensely complex, and a more thorough understanding of the personal and cultural dimensions...

For many threatened species, it is difficult to assess precisely for large areas the change in their abundances over time and the relative impacts of climate and anthropogenic land use. This is because surveys of such species are typically restricted to small geographic areas, are conducted during short time periods, and use different survey protoc...

Presence-only data used to develop species distribution models are often biased towards areas that are frequently surveyed. Furthermore, the size of calibration area with respect to the area covered by the species occurrences has been shown to affect model accuracy. However, existing assessments of the effect of data inadequacy and calibration size...

Each year an estimated US$20–30 million is spent by government and non-government organisations in efforts to conserve the Bornean orangutan. However, recent population analysis reveals that these efforts have been unable to reduce species decline. A major aim of the Indonesian National Action Plan for orangutan conservation is to “improve in-situ...

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals underscore the need for improved understanding of relationships between changes in landscapes, livelihoods, and social welfare, and how these relate to tackling poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation. Such assessments are especially relevant in the context of oil palm agricultural expans...

Coral reef restoration is an increasingly important part of tropical marine conservation. Information about what motivates coral reef restoration as well as its success and cost is not well understood but needed to inform restoration decisions. We systematically review and synthesise data from mostly scientific studies published in peer‐reviewed an...

Community forestry is a participatory approach aiming to achieve sustainable forest management while also reducing poverty among rural communities. Yet, evidence of the impacts of community forestry programmes on both forest conservation and poverty alleviation is scarce, and there is limited understanding of impacts across different social and bio...

Palm oil producing countries regularly promote the positive impact of oil palm agriculture on poverty alleviation, despite limited evidence about the contribution of this crop on village well-being. Past evaluations that quantify the social impact of oil palm are dominated by localized studies, which complicate the detection of generalizable findin...

Managers of Indigenous Protected Areas (IPAs) may need to communicate the value provided by their protected area to indigenous and nonindigenous stakeholders, especially if a political focus on maximizing economic opportunities conflicts with traditional priorities. To facilitate this process, we used the latest Intergovernmental Science‐Policy Pla...

Conservation biology and restoration ecology have historically focused on promoting biodiversity and safeguarding endangered species. However, the ecosystem services (ES) concept has given these fields a new, anthropocentric rationale: promoting human wellbeing. Here we investigate how the ES concept has penetrated decision making and public suppor...

Recent rates of deforestation on private lands in Australia rival deforestation hotspots around the world, despite conservation policies in place to avert deforestation. This study uses causal impact estimation techniques to determine if a controversial conservation policy - the Vegetation Management Act (VMA) - has successfully reduced deforestati...

Policy-driven shifts from net deforestation to forest expansion are being stimulated by increasing social preferences for forest ecosystem services. However, policy uncertainty can disrupt or reverse the positive effects of forest transitions. For instance, if the loss of remnant (primary) forest continues, the ecological benefits of net forest gai...

Public preferences for ecological restoration can be revealed through environmental valuation studies that aim to measure willingness to pay. However, respondents’ environmental views will often influence the conclusions drawn from such studies. We conducted a national survey of perceptions of the benefits and perverse outcomes arising from ecologi...

An integrated understanding of both social and ecological aspects of environmental issues is essential to address pressing sustainability challenges. An integrated social-ecological systems perspective is purported to provide a better understanding of the complex relationships between humans and nature. Despite a threefold increase in the amount of...

Saltmarshes are intertidal grasslands that produce a range of ecosystem services that underpin human wellbeing. In the UK, and globally, saltmarsh extent is decreasing—and the condition of existing areas is threatened by coastal squeeze, deteriorating water quality and agricultural activities. In this research, we identify priority areas for saltma...

When development impacts a broad landscape and causes the loss of multiple ecosystem services, decisions about which of these impacts to offset must be made. We use industrial oil-palm developments in Kalimantan and quantify the potential for restoration to offset oil-palm impacts on carbon storage and biodiversity. We developed a unique backcastin...

Coral reef ecosystems are seriously threatened by changing conditions in the ocean. Although many factors are implicated, climate change has emerged as a dominant and rapidly growing threat. Developing a long‐term strategic plan for the conservation of coral reefs is urgently needed yet is complicated by significant uncertainty associated with clim...

Environmental policies and regulations have been instrumental in influencing deforestation rates around the world. Understanding how these policies change stakeholder behaviours is critical for determining policy impact. In Queensland, Australia, changes in native vegetation management policy seem to have influenced land clearing behaviour of landh...

How green spaces in cities benefit urban residents depends critically on the interaction between biophysical and socio-economic factors. Urban ecosystem services are affected by both ecosystem characteristics and the social and economic attributes of city dwellers. Yet, there remains little synthesis of the interactions between ecosystem services,...

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Unsustainable exploitation of natural resources is increasingly affecting the highly biodiverse tropics [1, 2]. Although rapid developments in remote sensing technology have permitted more precise estimates of land-cover change over large spatial scales [3, 4, 5], our knowledge about the effects of these changes on wildlife is much more sparse [6,...