Mark Burgman

Mark Burgman
University of Melbourne | MSD · Biological science

About

49
Publications
21
Reads
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955
Citations

Publications

Publications (49)
Article
Full-text available
Demand is increasing among investors to create portfolios that encourage positive outcomes for biological diversity. The evolution of investment strategies for transitions to zero carbon over the last two decades provides insights that will assist in shaping strategies for biodiversity-positive investments. Many emerging approaches to capture compa...
Article
Joanne Wheeler and colleagues review the history of space sustainability challenges and discuss urgent contemporary issues in the effective environmental management of space
Preprint
Demand is increasing amongst investors to create portfolios that encourage positive outcomes for biological diversity. The evolution of investment strategies for transitions to zero carbon over the last two decades provides insights that will assist in shaping strategies for biodiversity-positive investments. Many emerging approaches to capture com...
Article
Full-text available
Journal peer review regulates the flow of ideas through an academic discipline and thus has the power to shape what a research community knows, actively investigates, and recommends to policymakers and the wider public. We might assume that editors can identify the ‘best’ experts and rely on them for peer review. But decades of research on both exp...
Article
Full-text available
The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets proposed in 2015 are wide ranging and achieving them before 2030 may require extraordinarily high costs. Prioritizing a more manageable and logical sequence of SDGs targets based on national conditions is critical to reduce the complexity of SDGs, lower costs, ensure transitions are effici...
Article
Full-text available
Conservation is predominantly an exercise in trying to change human behaviour – whether that of consumers whose choices drive unsustainable resource use, of land managers clearing natural habitats, or of policymakers failing to deliver on environmental commitments. Yet conservation research and practice have made only limited use of recent advances...
Article
Full-text available
Notionally objective probabilistic risk models, built around ideas of cause and effect, are used to predict impacts and evaluate trade-offs. In this paper, we focus on the use of expert judgement to fill gaps left by insufficient data and understanding. Psychological and contextual phenomena such as anchoring, availability bias, confirmation bias a...
Article
Full-text available
Human activities are degrading ecosystems worldwide, posing existential threats for biodiversity and humankind. Slowing and reversing this degradation will require profound and widespread changes to human behaviour. Behavioural scientists are therefore well placed to contribute intellectual leadership in this area. This Perspective aims to stimulat...
Article
In 2015, 193 countries committed to 17 sustainable development goals (SDG/SDGs). Assessing the impacts of policies or actions on SDGs can help countries to improve actions towards achieving SDGs. There is a need for quantitative methods for assessing the impacts of international agreements on regional SDGs. To fill this research gap, we constructed...
Article
Full-text available
Groups have access to more diverse information and typically outperform individuals on problem solving tasks. Crowdsolving utilises this principle to generate novel and/or superior solutions to intellective tasks by pooling the inputs from a distributed online crowd. However, it is unclear whether this particular instance of “wisdom of the crowd” c...
Preprint
Full-text available
Replication is a hallmark of scientific research. As replications of individual studies are resource intensive, techniques for predicting the replicability are required. We introduce a new technique to evaluating replicability, the repliCATS (Collaborative Assessments for Trustworthy Science) process, a structured expert elicitation approach based...
Article
Full-text available
Aichi Target 12 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) contains the aim to ‘prevent extinctions of known threatened species’. To measure the degree to which this was achieved, we used expert elicitation to estimate the number of bird and mammal species whose extinctions were prevented by conservation action in 1993–2020 (the lifetime of th...
Conference Paper
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Groups often struggle to reach decisions, especially when populations are strongly divided by conflicting views. Traditional methods for collective decision-making involve polling individuals and aggregating results. In recent years, a new method called Artificial Swarm Intelligence (ASI or Swarm AI) has been developed that enables networked human...
Article
Full-text available
How might analytic reasoning in intelligence reports be substantially improved? One conjecture is that this can be achieved through a combination of crowdsourcing and structured analytic techniques (SATs). To explore this conjecture, we developed a new crowdsourcing platform supporting groups in collaborative reasoning and intelligence report draft...
Article
Full-text available
Biodiversity loss is a critical sustainability issue, and companies are beginning to seek ways to assess their biodiversity performance. Initiatives to date have developed biodiversity indicators for specific business contexts (e.g., spatial scales—from site, to product, to regional, or corporate scales); however, many are not widely translatable a...
Preprint
Full-text available
There is an immediate global need to reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission, both in order to manage the ongoing pandemic and to assist with a phased transition to more normal societal conditions. We performed a solution scan to identify societal options for reducing SARS-CoV-2 transmission and spread. We read the literature, consulted experts in different...
Chapter
Conservation Research, Policy and Practice - edited by William J. Sutherland April 2020
Article
Full-text available
Cambridge Core - Ecology and Conservation - Conservation Research, Policy and Practice - edited by William J. Sutherland
Preprint
Full-text available
Aichi Target 12 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) aims to 'prevent extinctions of known threatened species'. To measure its success, we used a Delphi expert elicitation method to estimate the number of bird and mammal species whose extinctions were prevented by conservation action in 1993 - 2020 (the lifetime of the CBD) and 2010 - 20...
Technical Report
The outcomes of this project, in conjunction with CEBRA project 1402B, will provide the basis for developing a cost-effective and risk-based plant health surveillance system that maximises the chances of pest detection, and thus minimises the economic and environmental cost involved in eradicating and managing them if established. The app has been...
Article
Full-text available
Aim The trait‐based vulnerability assessment (TVA) uses Boolean rules to assess species sensitivity, adaptive capacity and exposure to climate change to identify those that are climate‐change vulnerable. The protocol is being increasingly used to assess climate‐change impacts to a diversity of taxa, as it requires fewer data compared to niche and m...
Article
Full-text available
Environmental decisions are often deferred to groups of experts, committees, or panels to develop climate policy, plan protected areas, or negotiate trade‐offs for biodiversity conservation. There is, however, surprisingly little empirical research on the performance of group decision making related to the environment. We examined examples from a r...
Article
Full-text available
Background: The events of 9/11 and the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction precipitated fundamental changes within the United States Intelligence Community. As part of the reform, analytic tradecraft standards were revised and codified into a policy document – Intelligence Commun...
Article
In the wake of 9/11 and the war in Iraq, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence adopted Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) 203 – a list of analytic tradecraft standards – and appointed an ombudsman charged with monitoring their implementation. In this paper, we identify three assumptions behind ICD203: (1) tradecraft standards can...
Article
Full-text available
Aim Climate change is a major threat to the persistence of biodiversity. Global assessments highlight the most climate vulnerable species and geographic regions based on species traits and measures of exposure to climate change. Yet the majority of climate change vulnerability assessments have focused on terrestrial and marine vertebrates and large...
Article
Full-text available
Disease spread modeling is widely used by veterinary authorities to predict the impact of emergency animal disease outbreaks in livestock and to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of different management interventions. Such models require knowledge of basic disease epidemiology as well as information about the population of animals at risk. Essential...
Article
Sustainable green chemistry depends on technically feasible, cost-effective and socially acceptable decisions by regulators, industry and the wider community. The discipline needs to embrace a new suite of tools and train proponents in their use. We propose a set of tools that will bridge the gap between technical feasibility and efficiency on one...
Article
Full-text available
Animal abundance data are essential for endangered species conservation, tracking invasive species spread, biosecurity, agricultural applications and wildlife monitoring; however, obtaining abundance data are a perennial challenge. Recent improvements in the resolution of remotely sensed imagery, and image‐processing tools and software have facilit...
Article
Full-text available
In livestock industries, reliable up-to-date spatial distribution and abundance records for animals and farms are critical for governments to manage and respond to risks. Yet few, if any, countries can afford to maintain comprehensive, up-to-date agricultural census data. Statistical modelling can be used as a proxy for such data but comparative mo...
Data
Summary of the source and calculation of predictor variables used for modelling. There are 22 predictor variables, with variation in some predictors across properties represented by both standard deviation and mean of the variable. (DOCX)
Data
Map of livestock units (LSU) per hectare across New Zealand from Agribase™. White areas represent areas removed such as cross leased land or areas of missing data. Areas of more than 10 LSU/cattle per hectare are represented in dark green. LSU represented per hectare is used for display purposes only. (TIF)
Data
Model results for cattle. The cattle prediction root mean squared error (RMSPE) using the withheld results for both individual farms within regions and to 3km quarantine zones. Table also shows the mean number of cattle per farm in the region, the standard deviation for all farms in brackets, and the total number of farms in each region. Results fo...
Data
Model results for livestock units (LSU). The LSU prediction root mean squared error (RMSPE) using the withheld results for both individual farms within regions and to 3km quarantine zones. Table also shows the mean number of LSU per farm in the region, the standard deviation for all farms in brackets, and the total number of farms in each region. R...
Article
Extinction of a species is difficult to detect, yet there are important conservation consequences of classifying an extant species as extinct or an extinct species as extant, and potentially significant costs of making the wrong classification. To deal with the uncertainties of detecting extinctions, some Critically Endangered species are tagged as...
Technical Report
Governments make various biosecurity decisions that require spatial predictions of the likelihood of pest occurrence or the suitability of potential habitat. A number of modelling tools can inform these decisions, which can be broadly characterised as correlative approaches and process-based approaches. The project used marine and terrestrial case...

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