Robert L. Pressey’s research while affiliated with James Cook University and other places

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 socioeconomic systems in which they are embedded create unique challenges for scheduling conservation with this approach. We investigated a range of scheduling approaches within a return on investment framework for breeding waterfowl and broods in the Prairie Pothole Region of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana. Current conservation targeting for waterfowl in the region focuses mostly on the distribution and abundance of breeding waterfowl. We tested whether MaxGain approaches for waterfowl conservation differed from MinLoss approaches in terms of return on investment and which approach performed best in avoiding loss of waterfowl and broods separately. We also examined variation in results based upon the temporal scale of the abundance layers used for input and compared the region's current scheduling approach with results from our simulations. Our results suggested that MinLoss was the most efficient scheduling approach for both breeding waterfowl and broods and that using just breeding waterfowl to target areas for conservation programs might cause organizations to overlook important areas for broods, particularly over shorter timespans. The higher efficiency of MinLoss approaches in our simulations also indicated that incorporating probability of wetland drainage into decision‐making improved the overall return on investment. We recommend that future conservation scheduling for easements in the region and for private land conservation in general include some form of return on investment or cost‐effective analysis to make conservation more transparent.

Stakeholder engagement is essential to conserve ecosystems and associated biodiversity. Outdoor recreation specialists represent stakeholder groups that often rely on specific healthy ecosystems and have unique incentives to contribute to conservation and stewardship. We introduce the concept of habitat-dependent outdoor recreation conservation organizations (HDORCOs) and their potential to harness outdoor recreation enthusiasm to achieve ecosystem-scale conservation objectives. We identify potential roles for HDORCOs in nurturing pro-environmental attitudes and facilitating stewardship behavior among recreationists, focusing on examples from recreational fishing specialists and coastal marine ecosystems. While HDORCOs have achieved conservation outcomes in a range of settings, transferability across recreational specializations and ecological, cultural, socioeconomic, and governance contexts could remain challenging and potentially requires further development of the HDORCO concept. Communication with HDORCOs is one strategy to enhance engagement of recreationists, stakeholder groups not traditionally associated with pro-environmental behavior, in ecosystem-scale conservation efforts.

Suppressing expert knowledge can hide environmentally damaging practices and policies from public scrutiny. We surveyed ecologists and conservation scientists from universities, government, and industry across Australia to understand the prevalence and consequences of suppressing science communication. Government (34%) and industry (30%) respondents reported higher rates of undue interference by employers than did university respondents (5%). Internal communications (29%) and media (28%) were curtailed most, followed by journal articles (11%), and presentations (12%). When university and industry researchers avoided public commentary, this was mainly for fear of media misrepresentation, while government employees were most often constrained by senior management and workplace policy. One third of respondents reported personal suffering related to suppression, including job losses and deteriorating mental health. Substantial reforms are needed, including to codes of practice, and governance of environmental assessments and research, so that scientific advice can be reported openly, in a timely manner and free from interference.

The global network of protected areas (PAs) is systematically biased towards remote and unproductive places. Consequently, the processes threatening biodiversity are not halted and conservation impact—defined as the beneficial environmental outcomes arising from protection relative to the counterfactual of no intervention—is smaller than previously thought. Yet, many conservation plans still target species’ representation, which can fail to lead to impact by not considering the threats they face, such as land conversion and climate change. Here we aimed to identify spatial conservation priorities that minimize the risk of land conversion, while retaining sites with high value for threatened plants at risk from climate change in the Brazilian Cerrado. We compared a method of sequential implementation of conservation actions to a static strategy applied at one time-step. For both schedules of conservation actions, we applied two methods for setting priorities: (i) minimizing expected habitat conversion and prioritizing valuable sites for threatened plants (therefore maximizing conservation impact), and (ii) prioritizing sites based only on their value for threatened plants, regardless of their vulnerability to land conversion (therefore maximizing representation). We found that scenarios aimed at maximizing conservation impact reduced total vegetation loss, while still covering large proportions of species’ ranges inside PAs and priority sites. Given that planning to avoid vegetation loss provided these benefits, vegetation information could represent a reliable surrogate for overall biodiversity. Besides allowing for the achievement of two distinct goals (representation and impact), the impact strategies also present great potential for implementation, especially under current conservation policies.

Proper assessing the impacts of conservation interventions can create interaction spaces between researcher and implementation. For example, protected areas (PAs) are the main strategy to conserve biodiversity, but there is a widespread bias in their location towards unproductive and inaccessible lands. Thus, investments on PAs are likely to have been allocated to areas that did not need protection, at least in the short term, creating communication noise to the society. Here, we estimate the likely conservation impact of the recently established (2002–2012) PAs and indigenous lands (ILs) in a future scenario of land use projected to 2050. We selected areas that were similar to the PAs/ILs with positive conservation impact to propose spatial priorities aiming to minimize loss of Cerrado vegetation in the future. In our analyses, PAs in general and those of strict protection had significantly lower conversion rates than control areas, while sustainable use PAs and ILs showed no difference between control and protected areas. We did not find differences in impact values between PAs and ILs, but impact values were higher for strict protection than for sustainable use areas. We found a high density of potential priority areas to maximize impact in northern Cerrado. This region is the next agricultural frontier in the biome, having extensive vegetation cover that can be legally converted according to national legislation. By pinpointing conservation priorities based on impact, we can improve the benefit from land protection and increase the space of interactions between science, policymaking and society at large.

A growing number of studies suggest a participatory ecosystem approach to support decision-making toward resilience and sustainability in social-ecological systems. Social-ecological resilience (SER) principles and practices are recommended to manage natural crises. However, it is necessary to broaden our understanding of SER on human-induced disturbances driven by economic development projects. In this paper we present the social-ecological system of Araçá Bay (Brazil), a small-scale fishery community that has experienced successive disturbances due to development projects since the 1930s. There was a lack of studies about the impacts of development projects in this bay. As part of a major project that aimed to build an ecosystem-based management plan for Araçá Bay through a participatory planning process, we focused on investigating fishers’ traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) to understand Araçá Bay’s small-scale fisheries social-ecological system. The objectives were to: (1) investigate fishers’ TEK regarding management practices and linked social mechanisms, human-induced disturbances and their consequences for the social-ecological system, ecosystem goods and services, and future threats; and (2) provide information based on TEK to the participatory planning process and analyze its contribution to Araçá Bay’s ecosystem-based management plan. Combined methods were used during 3 years of intense research-action (2014–2017): in-depth ethno-oceanographic interviews with expert fishers; monitoring Araçá Bay participatory meetings; and participant observation. Genuine local practices and social mechanisms from traditional culture were recorded, as well as TEK about 57 target fish species and methods to protect habitats and natural resources. Fishers also reported ecosystem disturbances and recovery processes. TEK was codified through SWOT analysis to assist the participatory planning process. Ecosystem services and threats based on TEK were brought to the participatory process, acknowledged by the participants, and incorporated into the management plan. TEK analysis proved to be an important methodology to provide historical environmental data regarding the impacts of development projects and support planning in disturbed ecosystems. In order to support coastal marine ecosystem-based management strategies toward SER and sustainability, researchers and practitioners should consider traditional territories in planning, recognize local practices and social mechanisms, and consider TEK on ecosystem goods and services and on historical human-induced disturbances.

In recent decades, the number and extent of protected areas (PAs) have increased, covering >10% of the Earth. However, protection tends to be residual because PAs have been consistently established on marginal lands that minimize costs and conflicts with extractive uses instead of focusing on places important to biodiversity. Here, we provide a panorama of the current network of PAs in Brazil, examine the biases of protection in relation to slope and land use intensity, and determine whether biases vary between biomes. We measured protection bias by accounting for differences between PAs and the municipalities in which they were established, indicating the direction and strength of bias. Brazil has 18% of its land under protection, but 70% of this is in the Amazon. Brazil's other biomes hardly reach 10% of their territories under protection and have strong protection bias. Generally, PAs are strongly biased towards lands with low intensity of use before they were established compared to their background landscapes. There was a small bias towards high slope, but most PAs had the same slope profile as their background landscapes. Trusting percentages of area under protection as a measure of conservation success risks misdirecting conservation actions to areas of lower biological importance and lower threat. To promote effective conservation actions more evidence-informed strategies should be used, based on appropriate ecological criteria and explicit objectives that allow us to measure the likely conservation impacts.

Effectively controlling invasive species on islands is a critical aspect of global conservation. Having the potential to outcompete or consume native species, it is particularly important to remove them from islands harbouring unique flora and fauna. Lord Howe Island, a World Heritage listed area to the east of the Australian mainland, is in the midst of a long-term weed management project, where the most prolific invasive species is cherry guava, with over 700,000 plants removed so far. In such projects, it is critical to have a good understanding of the invasion dynamics and removal process to have reliable estimates of project timeline and success, and to ensure the best removal strategies are being utilised. In this paper we model cherry guava growth, spread and removal on Lord Howe Island, fitting our model to 12 years of removal data. Our mean estimate is that there are 102,091 plants remaining on the island, which will take approximately 25 years to remove at current levels of eradication effort. Altering the strategy to search every year, rather than biennially, reduces the eradication time to 20 years, which falls within the project target, while also decreasing the total search effort. However, simply increasing search effort to finish faster actually increases the total eradication effort. This shows that the benefits of making careful adjustments to a strategy can far out-weight the benefit of simply investing more money into control. This project exemplifies how high-quality removal record-keeping can be used to generate models that provide important long-term forecasts of project success and suggest effective strategic improvements.