Vanessa M Adams

• PhD, James Cook University
• Associate Professor at University of Tasmania

Terrestrial protected areas are essential for biodiversity conservation, yet it is not fully understood when and how different types of protected areas are most effective in achieving specific conservation objectives. We assessed the impact of reserves on tree cover loss and gain through a case study in Tasmania, Australia. We considered varying pr...

Antarctica and the Southern Ocean are key elements in the physical and biological Earth system. Human-induced climate change, and other human activities in the region, are leading to several potential interacting tipping points with major and irreversible consequences. Here, we examine eight potential physical, biological, chemical, and social Anta...

Climate change poses significant risks to socio-ecological systems, especially at the local level. Local government climate change adaptation strategies must respond to the physical impacts of a changing climate as well as community perceptions about climate change risks and impacts. However, adaptation strategies often overlook diverse stakeholder...

Agricultural landscapes often overlap with areas of high biodiversity. Conservation efforts in these areas have the potential to play a pivotal role in mitigating biodiversity loss and supporting global conservation targets. This study investigates the effectiveness of private conservation interventions established in an agricultural landscape and...

Effective climate change adaptation planning requires evaluating the interplay of physical landscape characteristics and community perceptions of places. Geographic information system (GIS)-based approaches to measuring environmental values can identify locations for planning prioritization. But they seldom are used to consider spatial differences...

2024) Predicting the impacts of clearing on vegetation communities: a model-based approach for identifying conservation priorities in ABSTRACT Predicting outcomes is critical for conservation prioritisation. We predicted the areas that are likely to be impacted using a generalised estimating equation from a logistic regression and intersected our m...

Habitat loss is a key driver of species extinction, demanding effective policies to regulate land clearing and mitigate this threat. This study examines the impact of policy changes on the availability of vegetation for clearing in Queensland, Australia, focusing on three policy variants from 2012, 2015, and 2019. Our analysis highlights significan...

1. Web-based studies of human dimensions are increasing across environmental and socio-ecological disciplines. However, the prevalence of fraud threatens research quality. Increased fraud rates should be expected as surveys move progressively more online, motivated by expanding reach, cost savings and/or in response to COVID-19. Web-based research...

Natural resource managers need information about both human and natural systems and interactions between those systems. Much data is available, but mostly from disparate sources and data have often been collected at different time steps and at different geographic scales. We used insights from the literature to select 270 relevant variables, availa...

What grows where? Knowledge about where to find particular species in nature must have been key to the survival of humans throughout our evolution. Over time, and as people colonised new land masses and habitats, interactions with the local biota led to a wealth of combined traditional and scientific wisdom about the distributions of species and th...

Effective adaptation to climate risks requires identifying and realizing community beliefs about which locations require management attention. Environmental planners and asset managers, especially those in rural and regional areas, often struggle to engage with community sentiments about place or to incorporate those feelings into decision-making p...

Area-based targets, such as percentages of regions protected, are popular metrics of success in the protection of nature. While easily quantified, these targets can be uninformative about the effectiveness of conservation interventions and should be complemented by program impact evaluations. However, most impact evaluations have examined the effec...

Australia is a global leader in land clearing and biodiversity loss. The overwhelming majority of land clearing within Australia and, globally, is driven by agricultural conversion. The importance of agricultural lands also leads to the concentration of habitat protection in landscapes that do not support productive land uses, which might contribut...

Land clearing and protected area provision are two contrasting forces shaping the persistence of species in the landscape. Using Australia's flora as a case study, we characterize the three possible states of species persistence: protected, cleared, or at risk of future loss based on agricultural capability, using a comprehensive suite of plant dis...

Local governments have a vital climate change adaptation role. However, major breakdowns in the ability of local governments to mainstream adaptation responses have been widely observed. Using a Systematic Quantitative Literature Review method, we assessed 131 original research articles published 2005–2020 to answer three key questions: What trends...

Multiple-use protected areas (PAs) aim to safeguard biodiversity and contribute to human well-being, making them key instruments in meeting the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) goals. However , it is currently unclear what evidence exists on the impacts of human activities performed within them. This limits our understanding of...

Abstract Private land conservation has become an important tool for protecting biodiversity and habitat, but methods for prioritizing and scheduling conservation on private land are still being developed. While return on investment methods have been suggested as a potential path forward, the different processes linking private landscapes to the soc...

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...

Globally, invasive grasses are a major threat to protected areas (PAs) due to their ability to alter community structure and function, reduce biodiversity, and alter fire regimes. However, there is often a mismatch between the threat posed by invasive grasses and the management response. We document a case study of the spread and management of the...

Ongoing land clearing is a key driver of biodiversity loss and climate change. Effective action to halt land clearing and land degradation ultimately relies on understanding patterns of land capability for production uses, in particular agriculture, as a key driver of land use. Here we describe a national agricultural land capability map for Austra...

Societal Impact Statement Mixed species plantings present an attractive alternative to monoculture reforestation through their added benefits to biodiversity. Yet there is ambiguity in the use of the term ‘biodiversity’ in carbon and biodiversity markets, which may create perverse outcomes when designing schemes and projects. Here, we review how th...

Competing land‐use demands for agriculture and nature conservation is one of the most significant global challenges. To improve the health of landscapes, collaborative transdisciplinary solutions are required. Environmental accounting is an attractive governance approach for helping to deliver healthy future landscapes; however, the diversity of ap...

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...

This paper relates evidence from the COVID‐19 pandemic to the concept of pandemic refuges, as developed in literature on global catastrophic risk. In this literature, a refuge is a place or facility designed to keep a portion of the population alive during extreme global catastrophes. COVID‐19 is not the most extreme pandemic scenario, but it is no...

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for global environmental agreements is how higher-income and lower-income countries share the costs of implementing them. This problem has become particularly acute as biodiversity and climate ambitions have increased across recent COPs (Conferences of Parties). Here, we estimate the likely distribution of costs...

Managing complex problems in socio-ecological systems (SES) requires innovative approaches, which account for multiple scales, large datasets, and diverse lived experiences. By combining two commonly utilized mixed-methods, public participation GIS (PPGIS) and Q-method (Q), Q + PPGIS has the potential to reveal competing agendas and reduce conflict...

Global crop production rate has exceeded the availability of pollination services provided by managed honeybees, and habitat loss remains a key factor in the loss of wild pollinators. Revegetation of agricultural land and wild pollination may provide a solution; however, the collection of floral trait data that are correlated to pollinator preferen...

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are increasingly applied to regulate fishing and conserve marine biodiversity. Yet, MPAs are often designed without sufficient ecological knowledge of the species they are intended to protect. This is particularly relevant to large and wide-ranging marine predators including many elasmobranchs (sharks and rays), for wh...

The main effort to secure threatened species globally is to set aside land and sea for their conservation via governance arrangements such as protected areas. But not even the biggest protected area estate will cover enough area to halt most species declines. Consequently, there is a need for assessments of how species habitats are distributed acro...

Participatory scenario planning (PSP) has mainly concerned scenario development and outreach, with less emphasis on scenario assessment. However, eliciting stakeholder responses to scenarios, focusing on subjective wellbeing, can increase the legitimacy, relevance, and applicability of PSP. We developed a PSP exercise with a multi-stakeholder, cros...

Globally, both managed and wild pollination services are unable to meet current rates of crop production and pollination demand. Wild pollination services could be improved through the reforestation of agricultural land margins, however plant–pollinator networks remain poorly understood and the collection of key floral traits a complex process. Her...

Protected areas aim to conserve nature, ecosystem services, and cultural values; however, they have variable success in doing so under high development pressure. Southeast Asian protected areas faced the highest level of human pressure at the turn of the twenty-first century. To estimate their effectiveness in conserving forest cover and forest car...

Given proposed expansion of developments in northern Australia and current tensions among stakeholders, there is a need to develop new planning approaches that support multiple uses of land and water, while maintaining environmental and cultural values. This project aimed to demonstrate how to operationalise multi-objective catchment planning suppo...

To meet the ambitious objectives of biodiversity and climate conventions, the international community requires clarity on how these objectives can be operationalized spatially and how multiple targets can be pursued concurrently. To support goal setting and the implementation of international strategies and action plans, spatial guidance is needed...

Visiting and experiencing national parks, especially hiking in backcountry areas, has become a global phenomenon. Park managers are often challenged by how to ensure that hikers are not harmed due to lack of preparedness. Rescuing injured visitors and recovering deceased can be expensive, dangerous and emotionally difficult. Prevention of harm rest...

Mapping the various anthropogenic threats to species is a key tool to support and guide effective decisions for management of these threats. While there are a range of approaches to mapping threats, the extent to which these provide consistent or differing results has not been investigated. The overall aim of this study was to address this gap by e...

Protein from fish is essential for feeding the world’s population and is increasingly recognized as critical for food security. To ensure that fisheries resources can be sustainably maintained, fisheries management must be appropriately implemented. When logbook and landing records data are not complete or are incorrect, it is challenging to have a...

Protected area coverage is expanding rapidly in response to threats such as habitat degradation, resource overexploitation, and climate change. Given limited resources, conservation scientists have developed systematic methods for identifying where it is most efficient to protect biodiversity. To improve the outcomes of protected areas, planners ha...

Protected areas are often thought of as a key conservation strategy for avoiding deforestation and retaining biodiversity; therefore, it is crucial to know how effective they are at achieving this purpose. Using a case study from Queensland, Australia, we identified and controlled for bias in allocating strictly protected areas (IUCN Class I and II...

The human aspect of conservation and restoration is implicit and widely considered in the literature. However, human traits are rarely if ever incorporated into models to explain actual quantitative measures of success or failure. A paper by Sher et al. recently published in a special issue of Wetlands filled this gap by exploring the impact of the...

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.

Species traits have much to offer conservation science. However, the selection and application of trait data in conservation requires rigor to avoid perverse or unexpected outcomes. To guide trait use, we review how traits are applied along the conservation continuum: the progression of conservation actions from assessing risk, to designing and pri...

Questions The taxonomic and functional composition of plant communities capture different dimensions of diversity. Functional diversity (FD) – as calculated from species traits – typically increases with species richness in communities and is expected to be higher in less extreme environments, where a broader range of functional strategies can pers...

Aim To quantify the impact of the 2019–2020 megafires on Australian plant diversity by assessing burnt area across 26,062 species ranges and the effects of fire history on recovery potential. Further, to exemplify a strategic approach to prioritizing plant species affected by fire for recovery actions and conservation planning at a national scale....

There is a growing recognition that conservation strategies should be designed accounting for cross-realm connections, such as freshwater connections to land and sea, to ensure effectiveness of marine spatial protection and minimize perverse outcomes of changing land-use. Yet, examples of integration across realms are relatively scarce, with most t...

Abstract Systematic conservation planning identifies priority areas to cost‐effectively meet conservation targets. Yet, these tools rarely guide wholesale declaration of reserve systems in a single time step due to financial and implementation constraints. Rather, incremental scheduling of actions to progressively build reserve networks is required...

Protected areas aim to conserve nature by providing safe havens for biodiversity. However, protection from habitat loss, poaching and other threats, is not guaranteed without adequate investment in their management. Here, we examine the relationship between management effectiveness using the Management Effectiveness Tracking Tool (METT) and trends...

Aim Traditional approaches for including species' distributions in conservation planning have presented them as long‐term averages of variation. Like these approaches, the main waterfowl conservation targeting tool in the United States Prairie Pothole Region (US PPR) is based primarily on long‐term averaged distributions of breeding pairs. While th...

Abstract Perpetual conservation easements are a popular method in some countries for addressing conservation goals. Landowner participation plays a key role in the development of these agreements. Despite the importance of involvement by landowners, no recent efforts have been made to synthesize information about the motivations for participation i...

Species that cannot adapt or keep pace with a changing climate are likely to need human intervention to shift to more suitable climates. While hundreds of articles mention using translocation as a climate‐change adaptation tool, in practice, assisted migration as a conservation action remains rare, especially for animals. This is likely due to conc...

Most of the terrestrial world is experiencing high rates of land conversion despite growth of the global protected area (PA) network. There is a need to assess whether the current global protection targets are achievable across all major ecosystem types and to identify those that need urgent protection. Using recent rates of habitat conversion and...

paragraph To meet the ambitious objectives of biodiversity and climate conventions, countries and the international community require clarity on how these objectives can be operationalized spatially, and multiple targets be pursued concurrently ¹ . To support governments and political conventions, spatial guidance is needed to identify which areas...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

The Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) ambitiously calls for an assessment of extinction risk for all recognised plant taxa by 2020. It is now clear that this target will not be met in the short-term; only 21-26% of known plant species have been assessed - a monumental shortfall in anticipated knowledge. Yet the need for risk assessments...

Synthesizing trait observations and knowledge across the Tree of Life remains a grand challenge for biodiversity science. Species traits are widely used in ecological and evolutionary science, and new data and methods have proliferated rapidly. Yet accessing and integrating disparate data sources remains a considerable challenge, slowing progress t...

Biodiversity is in rapid decline, largely driven by habitat loss and degradation. Protected area establishment and management are widely used to maintain habitats and species in perpetuity. Protected area extent has increased rapidly in recent years with area-based targets set within international conservation agreements such as the Convention on B...

Designing landscapes to accommodate both humans and nature poses huge challenges, but is increasingly recognised as an essential component of conservation and land management. The land-sparing land-sharing framework has been proposed as a tool to address this challenge. However, it has been largely criticised for its simplicity. We provide a new co...

Globally, maritime boundaries on oceans form the basis of governance and management of natural resources, yet the fish, and other marine resources neither conform nor confine to these artificial boundaries. As goods and services from marine life continue to retrogress under the intense human exploitation and changing global environment, resilience...

Human activity affecting the welfare of wild vertebrates, widely accepted to be sentient, and therefore deserving of moral concern, is widespread. A variety of motives lead to the killing of individual wild animals. These include to provide food, to protect stock and other human interests, and also for sport. The acceptability of such killing is wi...

More ambitious conservation efforts are needed to stop the global degradation of ecosystems and the extinction of the species that comprise them. Here, we estimate the minimum amount of land needed to secure known important sites for biodiversity, Earth's remaining wilderness, and the optimal locations for adequate representation of terrestrial spe...

Conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services in natural environments requires careful management choices. However, common methods of evaluating the impact of conservation interventions can have contextual shortcomings. Here, we make a call for counterfactual thinking—asking the question “what would have happened in the absence of an interven...

A substantial amount of money has been spent globally on threatened species management. While the number of threatened species continues to increase, we would expect to observe a portion of those receiving active management to respond positively and recover over time. Management of these recovering species requires a different approach to those whi...

Social science has a more diverse and meaningful role to play in conservation science and ecology than is currently being published within this field. We reflect on our personal research experiences to demonstrate how our in‐field learning has provided us with shared understandings of the importance of a broader engagement with social science metho...

Changing human behavior and attitudes are key to conserving global biodiversity. Despite evidence from other disciplines that strategic messaging can influence behavior and attitudes, it remains unclear how to best design messages to benefit biodiversity. We conducted a systematic literature review to investigate the status of conservation messagin...

Protected areas are a fundamental mechanism for conserving global biodiversity. Given limited conservation funds and shortfalls in funding for existing protected area management needs, a critical question is: should countries and states spend new funds on purchasing more land or managing existing protected areas to an acceptable standard? We used a...

With much of Earth's surface already heavily impacted by humans, there is a need to understand where restoration is required to achieve global conservation goals. Here, we show that at least 1.9 million km2 of land, spanning 190 (27%) terrestrial ecoregions and 114 countries, needs restoration to achieve the current 17% global protected area target...

Conservation practice requires an understanding of complex social‐ecological processes of a system and the different meanings and values that people attach to them. Mental models research offers a suite of methods that can be used to reveal these understandings and how they might affect conservation outcomes. Mental models are representations in pe...

Allocating multiple land-uses in the landscape while accommodating social preferences is an overarching goal of an effective land-use plan. While there is momentum to include social preferences into planning, successful integration of preferences for multiple objectives, such as development and conservation, have been limited to date. Our aim was t...

The Special Feature led by Sutherland, Dicks, Everard, and Geneletti ( Methods Ecology and Evolution , 9, 7–9, 2018) sought to highlight the importance of “qualitative methods” for conservation. The intention is welcome, and the collection makes many important contributions. Yet, the articles presented a limited perspective on the field, with a foc...

The field of systematic conservation planning has grown substantially, with hundreds of publications in the peer-reviewed literature and numerous applications to regional conservation planning globally. However, the extent to which systematic conservation plans have influenced management is unclear. This paper analyses factors that facilitate the t...

Systematic conservation planning (SCP) has increasingly been used to prioritize conservation actions, including the design of new protected areas to achieve conservation objectives. Over the last 10 years, the number of marine SCP studies has increased exponentially, yet there is no structured or reliable way to find information on methods, trends,...