Paul Armsworth

University of Tennessee | UTK · Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Social media plays an outsized role in information dissemination, issue mobilization, and public influence. For environmental nongovernmental organizations ("eNGOs"), social media plays a critical role in fundraising and inspiring engaged audiences using rich media and punchy taglines. Yet, there is little to no accounting of whether and how eNGOs...

Given declines in biodiversity and ecosystem services, funding to support conservation must be invested effectively. However, funds for conservation often come with geographic restrictions on where they can be spent. We introduce a method to demonstrate to supporters of conservation how much more could be achieved if they were to allow greater flex...

In our sample of 380 000 environmentally oriented users, nearly 50% became inactive on Twitter after it was sold in October 2022, a rate much higher than a control sample. Given Twitter’s importance for public communication, our finding has troubling implications for digital environmental information sharing and public mobilization.

Abstract Partnerships between organizations that engage in land protection are promoted as a way to improve the efficiency of limited conservation budgets. However, limited empirical exploration of the types of organizations involved in partnering and their organizational objectives precludes a holistic understanding of how to integrate partnering...

Managing social‐ecological systems (SES) requires balancing the need to tailor actions to local heterogeneity and the need to work over large areas to accommodate the extent of SES. This balance is particularly challenging for policy since the level of government where the policy is being developed determines the extent and resolution of action. We...

To be able to protect biodiversity in coming decades, conservation strategies need to consider what sites will be important for species not just today but also in the future. Different methods have been proposed to identify places that will be important for species in the future. Two of the most frequently used methods, ecological niche modeling an...

Research that can improve the resilience of social and natural systems to climate change has become more common. Many climate adaptation science organizations and agencies now focus on actionable science, a model that aims to have greater impacts on policy and practice than traditionally produced and distributed science. However, evaluations of res...

Pollination sustains terrestrial food webs and agricultural systems and links the dynamics of interacting plant and pollinator species. Although environmental stochasticity is ubiquitous and can propagate through communities via species interactions in a way that increases extinction risk, it is unknown whether stochasticity affects species uniform...

To combat biodiversity loss, there is increasing interest in safeguarding habitat by expanding protected areas. Given limited resources in conservation, organizations must invest in places that will add the greatest amount of value in species protection. To determine the added conservation value of protection, one needs to consider the level of hum...

Social media platforms, such as Twitter, are an increasingly important source of information and are forums for discourse within and between interest groups. Research highlights how social media communities have amplified movements such as the Arab Spring, #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter. But environmental digital discourse remains underexplored. In...

When seeking to make land conservation decisions, should managers favor actions that will make immediate differences or those promising long-term gains? The choice depends on how individuals weight benefits and costs experienced at different future times, something temporal discount rates can be used to represent. Despite the ubiquity of inter-temp...

Conservation organizations seek to achieve multiple benefits for biodiversity and ecosystem services through protected area expansion, necessitating an understanding of potential co‐benefits and trade‐offs. We use benefit functions derived from modeled and best‐available data to characterize five benefits (habitat area, total species richness, thre...

Policy tools are needed that allow reconciliation of human development pressures with conservation priorities. Biodiversity offsetting can be used to compensate for ecological losses caused by development activities. Landowners can choose to undertake conservation actions, including habitat restoration, to generate biodiversity offsets. Considerati...

Challenges facing societies around the globe as they plan for and adapt to climate change are so large that usable, research‐driven recommendations to inform management actions are urgently needed. We sought to understand factors that influence the variation of academic contribution and use of collaborative research on climate change. We surveyed r...

Expanding the coverage of reserve networks is critical for halting declines in biodiversity. Opportunities for land protection are driven in part by market dynamics, which affect conservation budgets, land acquisition costs, and the threat of habitat conversion. The financial and institutional characteristics of conservation organizations may lead...

Local communities often conserve nearby natural areas to support recreational activities and other benefits these areas provide. Areas protected by local communities could contribute to wider efforts to achieve large-scale conservation goals, such as biodiversity protection, provided the ecological conditions on-site are compatible with achieving t...

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...

Aim The Appalachian forests ecoregion in eastern North America supports a diverse and highly endemic temperate biota, which is potentially threatened by rapid climate change. We investigated possible outlooks for biodiversity in this biologically important ecoregion under future climate change. Location Appalachian forests ecoregion, USA. Methods...

Funding for protected areas is limited and recurrent costs associated with managing these sites must be considered in planning their acquisition. However, most conservation planning studies either ignore management costs or use snapshot estimates, even though they vary through time. We surveyed expenditures on management made over 15 years for 37 p...

Effective conservation programs should provide environmental benefits, but also promote local economic growth. Studies comparing environmental and economic impacts of conservation programs report mixed results. The potential trade-offs between environmental and economic impacts of conservation policies are examined by modeling a set of alternative...

Biodiversity offset markets can incentivize private landowners to take actions that benefit biodiversity. A spatially explicit integrated ecological-economic model is developed and employed for a UK region where offset buyers (house developers) and sellers (farmers) interact through trading offset credits. We simulate how changes in the ecological...

The role of time in estimating the cost of forest carbon is often ignored in the literature, nor does the literature address the issues of where and when the purchase of forest carbon storage becomes socially beneficial. In our study, we identify the spatial and temporal allocations of forest carbon investments that are socially beneficial based on...

Land protection efforts represent large societal investments and are critical to biodiversity conservation. Land protection involves a complex mosaic of areas managed by multiple organizations, using a variety of mechanisms to achieve different levels of protection. We develop an approach to synthesize, describe, and map this land protection divers...

Biodiversity worldwide has been declining rapidly in recent decades. Acquiring land for protection has been used as a main strategy to halt this decline. Conservation organizations commonly rely on spatial planning approaches to help identify priorities for land protection. These spatial planning approaches often assume that the overall amount of c...

The available tools and approaches to inform conservation decisions commonly assume detailed distribution data. We examine how well-established ecological concepts about patterns in local richness and community turnover can help overcome data limitations when planning future protected areas. To inform our analyses, we surveyed tree species in prote...

To help conserve biodiversity in coming decades, protected areas need to be located in places that will be important for species as their ranges shift to track suitable climatic conditions. Had past protected areas been optimally targeted to cover today's biodiversity, then we would expect future coverage to decline. However, past protected area si...

Open space areas protected by local communities may augment larger scale preservation efforts and may offer overlooked benefits to biodiversity conservation provided they are in suitable ecological condition. We examine protected areas established by local communities through ballot initiatives, a form of direct democracy, in California, USA. We co...

Local communities contribute to broader biodiversity protection goals when managing their immediate environment when they establish protected areas. However, their efforts are geographically constrained and often uncoordinated. We compare protected areas established by local communities through the direct democracy process in California, US, to pro...

Spatial optimization approaches that were originally developed to help conservation organizations determine protection decisions over small spatial scales are now used to inform global or continental scale priority setting. However, the different decision contexts involved in large‐scale resource allocation need to be considered. We present a conti...

Protected area systems include sites preserved by various institutions and mechanisms, but the benefits to biodiversity provided by different types of sites are poorly understood. Protected areas established by local communities for various reasons may provide complementary benefits to those established by large-scale agencies and organizations. Lo...

Giving land managers the ability to predict invasion patterns can provide planning tools for acquisition and management of protected areas. We compared the effects of roads and streams, two substantial pathways for delivery of invasive plant propagules and sources of disturbance that may facilitate invasions, on the abundance of non-native invasive...

The environmental benefits and costs of conservation policies often vary over space and through time. Accounting for this spatial and temporal heterogeneity has important implications for the potential cost effectiveness of different payment program designs. In this study, we examine the cost efficiency gain from spatial and temporal targeting in p...

Given ongoing pollinator declines, it is important to understand the dynamics of linked extinctions of plants driven by pollinator extinctions. Topological robustness models focused on this question suggest relatively high robustness of plant species to pollinator species extinctions. Still, existing robustness models typically assume that all inte...

The objective of this research is to examine how protected area size influences the conservation benefit and acquisition cost of creating a protected area, how the resulting effects influence the predicted rate of return on investment (ROI), and how those relationships change prioritization decision-making for selecting protected areas compared wit...

Finding ways to increase financial support is critical to conservation efforts. We used conservation fundraising data, unprecedented in their resolution, to reveal spatial patterns in philanthropic giving to a major land protection organization in the United States. We also quantified the relationship between the amount of effort devoted to fundrai...

Policy guidelines for creating new protected areas commonly recommend larger protected areas be favored. We examine whether these recommendations are justified, providing the first evaluation of this question to use return-on-investment (ROI) methods that account for how protected area size influences multiple ecological benefits and the economic c...

This research analyzes the effects of market conditions on the performance of incentive payment approaches for forest-based carbon sequestration. We develop supply curves for sequestered carbon using the relationship between deforestation for urbanization and the relative returns from forest products and urban uses under two different market condit...

Conservation organizations must redouble efforts to protect habitat given continuing biodiversity declines. Prioritization of future areas for protection is hampered by disagreements over what the ecological targets of conservation should be. Here we test the claim that such disagreements will become less important as conservation moves away from p...

Invasive species are a pervasive problem worldwide and considerable resources are directed towards their control. While there are many aspects to invasive species management, deciding how to allocate resources effectively when removing them is critical. There are often multiple control methods available, each with different characteristics. For exa...

Should conservation organizations focus on protecting habitats that are at imminent risk of being converted but are expensive or more remote areas that are less immediately threatened but where a large amount of land can be set aside? Variants of this trade‐off commonly arise in spatial planning. We examined this trade‐off using models of land use...

Marine protected areas ( MPA s) are increasingly integrated into fishery management for coastal systems. Size and spacing rules ( SSR s) have been proposed as simple MPA design guidelines, especially in regions where population connectivity data are limited. We assessed whether SSR s allow managers to design effective MPA networks under spatiotempo...

This chapter asks how organizations that society relies on to deliver biodiversity conservation perform in the face of rapid and unpredictable change. While much has been written about how species and ecosystems respond to environmental change, the same attention has not been given to how the human institutions charged with conserving species and e...

Governments across the globe are exploring ways to reduce the environmental and human health impacts created by shale energy production. In active areas, environmental regulations tend to be limited. We apply established instruments to empirically estimated environmental impact abatement cost curves for the development of 56 sites in Pennsylvania,...

Optimal policy recommendations from natural resource management models can involve fast-changing management interventions. Actual policies often change more gradually, potentially reflecting costs associated with policy adjustment. We examine how including policy adjustment costs changes policy recommendations in models of fishery management. Speci...

Land-acquisition strategies employed by conservation organizations vary in their flexibility. Conservation-planning theory largely fails to reflect this by presenting models that are either extremely inflexible-parcel acquisitions are irreversible and budgets are fixed-or extremely flexible-previously acquired parcels can readily be sold. This latt...

Growing energy demand has increased the need to manage conflicts between energy production and the environment. As an example, shale-gas extraction requires substantial surface infrastructure, which fragments habitats, erodes soils, degrades freshwater systems, and displaces rare species. Strategic planning of shale-gas infrastructure can reduce tr...

To counteract global species decline, modern biodiversity conservation engages in large projects, spends billions of dollars and engages many organizations working simultaneously within regions. To add to this complexity, the conservation sector has hierarchical structure, where conservation actions are often outsourced by funders (foundations, gov...

Ecological systems are dynamic and policies to manage them need to respond to that variation. However, policy adjustments will sometimes be costly, which means that fine-tuning a policy to track variability in the environment very tightly will only sometimes be worthwhile. We use a classic fisheries management problem, how to manage a stochasticall...

Ecological systems are dynamic and policies to manage them need to respond to that variation. However, policy adjustments will sometimes be costly, which means that fine-tuning a policy to track variability in the environment very tightly will only sometimes be worthwhile. We use a classic fisheries management problem, how to manage a stochasticall...

When managing heterogeneous socioecological systems, decision-makers must choose a spatial resolution at which to define management policies. Complex spatial policies allow managers to better reflect underlying ecological and economic heterogeneity, but incur higher compliance and enforcement costs. To choose the most appropriate management resolut...

Caught between ongoing habitat destruction and funding shortfalls, conservation organizations are using systematic planning approaches to identify places that offer the highest biodiversity return per dollar invested. However, available tools do not account for the landscape of funding for conservation or quantify the constraints this landscape imp...

A common focus for conservation planning is to identify locations for siting potential protected areas, something that requires estimates for the costs of setting up these areas and benefits for biodiversity of doing so. When cost data are not available over relevant scales, conservation planners commonly rely on proxy data that they hope will esti...

Species often confront changing resource distributions that result from natural and anthropogenic processes. For species that reproduce on or in close association with particular resources (e.g. host plants), changing resource distributions could affect the success of mate finding. We examine how mate-finding behaviours in an herbivorous insect med...

Hydraulic fracturing and related ground water issues are growing features in public discourse. Few have given much attention to surface impacts from shale gas development, which result from building necessary surface infrastructure. One way to reduce future impacts from gas surface development without radically changing industry practice is by form...

Patterns of discrete behaviors tied together in specific sequences are essential for the formation of complex behavioral phenomena. Such behavioral sequences can be of critical ecological importance, for example relating to resource acquisition, predator evasion, and sexual selection. The role of sequential behaviors in ecology, however, is underst...

Ecological systems are dynamic and policies to manage them need to respond to that variation. However, policy adjustments will sometimes be costly, which means that fine-tuning a policy to track variability in the environment very tightly will only sometimes be worthwhile. We use a classic fisheries management question -- how to manage a stochastic...

Conservation organizations must adapt to respond to the ecological impacts of global change. Numerous changes to conservation actions (eg facilitated ecological transitions, managed relocations, or increased corridor development) have been recommended, but some institutional restructuring within organizations may also be needed. Here we discuss the...

Ecosystem service provision varies temporally in response to natural and human-induced factors, yet research in this field is dominated by analyses that ignore the time-lags and feedbacks that occur within socio-ecological systems. The implications of this have been unstudied, but are central to understanding how service delivery will alter due to...

This contains the GitHub repository for all research materials (data, software, scripts, metadata, manuscript sources) for all of the work performed during the investigation and publication of the paper: "Optimal management of a stochastically varying population when policy adjustment is costly" in Ecological Applications. The repository is organiz...

Facing tight resource constraints, conservation organizations must allocate funds available for habitat protection as effectively as possible. Often, they combine spatially referenced economic and biodiversity data to prioritize land for protection. We tested how sensitive these prioritizations could be to differences in the spatial grain of these...

The effectiveness of conservation organizations is determined in part by how they adapt to changing conditions. Over the previous decade, economic conditions in the United States (US) showed marked variation including a period of rapid growth followed by a major recession. We examine how biodiversity conservation nonprofits in the US responded to t...

Observations of species occurrences are often used to inform spatial prioritizations for the effective use of limited conservation resources. Additional species observations have the potential to change where a conservation group plans to invest. But by how much? How different would conservation priorities be if planners updated current observation...

Background/Question/Methods Shale gas development in Central Appalachia (USA) has skyrocketed since 2007 due to rising natural gas prices and advancing hydrofracking and horizontal drilling. Shale gas development requires lots of surface infrastructure, the most prevalent being new well pads, access roads, and gathering pipelines. How large are t...

Background/Question/Methods Extinctions can be described in population dynamic terms as a transition from a positive population size to zero. Consequently, the factors that influence population trajectories also affect extinction risk. Much of the existing theoretical work on extinction risk evaluates the influence of single factors, such as spec...

Background/Question/Methods Much ecological theory underpinning studies in ecosystem management and life history evolution draws on a body of mathematics known as optimal control. In one set of applications, ecosystems managers are assumed to be seeking ‘optimal’ decisions over how to allocate and manage natural resources; in the other, an ‘optim...