Peer-reviewed publications

The Caribbean and Western Atlantic region hosts one of the world's most diverse geopolitical regions and a unique marine biota distinct from tropical seas in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. While this region varies in human population density, GDP and wealth, coral reefs, and their associated ecosystem services, are central to people's livelihoods. Unfortunately, the region's reefs have experienced extensive degradation over the last several decades. This degradation has been attributed to a combination of disease, overfishing, and multiple pressures from other human activities. Furthermore, the Caribbean region has experienced rapid ocean warming and acidification as a result of climate change that will continue and accelerate throughout the 21st century. It is evident that these changes will pose increasing threats to Caribbean reefs unless imminent actions are taken at the local, regional and global scale. Active management is required to sustain Caribbean reefs and increase their resilience to recover from acute stress events. Here, we propose local and regional solutions to halt and reverse Caribbean coral reef degradation under ongoing ocean warming and acidification. Because the Caribbean has already experienced high coral reef degradation, we suggest that this region may be suitable for more aggressive interventions that might not be suitable for other regions. Solutions with direct ecological benefits highlighted here build on existing knowledge of factors that can contribute to reef restoration and increased resilience in the Caribbean: (1) management of water quality, (2) reduction of unsustainable fishing practices, (3) application of ecological engineering, and (4) implementing marine spatial planning. Complementary socioeconomic and governance solutions include: (1) increasing communication and leveraging resources through the establishment of a regional reef secretariat, (2) incorporating reef health and sustainability goals into the blue economy plans for the region, and (3) initiating a reef labeling program to incentivize corporate partnerships for reef restoration and protection to sustain overall reef health in the region.

Three-dimensional point data acquired by Terrestrial Lidar Scanning (TLS) is used as ground observation in comparisons with fire severity indices computed from Landsat satellite multi-temporal images through Google Earth Engine (GEE). Forest fires are measured by the extent and severity of fire. Current methods of assessing fire severity are limited to on-site visual inspection or the use of satellite and aerial images to quantify severity over larger areas. On the ground, assessment of fire severity is influenced by the observers' knowledge of the local ecosystem and ability to accurately assess several forest structure measurements. The objective of this study is to introduce TLS to validate spectral burned ratios obtained from Landsat images. The spectral change was obtained by an image compositing technique through GEE. The 32 plots were collected using TLS in Wood Buffalo National Park, Canada. TLS-generated 3D points were converted to voxels and the counted voxels were compared in four height strata. There was a negative linear relationship between spectral indices and counted voxels in the height strata between 1 to 5 m to produce R2 value of 0.45 and 0.47 for unburned plots and a non-linear relationship in the height strata between 0 to 0.5m for burned plots to produce R2 value of 0.56 and 0.59. Shrub or stand development was related with the spectral indices at unburned plots, and vegetation recovery in the ground surface was related at burned plots. As TLS systems become more cost efficient and portable, techniques used in this study will be useful to produce objective assessments of structure measurements for fire refugia and ecological response after a fire. TLS is especially useful for the quick ground assessments which are needed for forest fire applications.

To account for progress towards conservation targets, monitoring systems should capture not only information on biodiversity but also knowledge on the dynamics of ecological processes and the related effects on human well-being. Protected areas represent complex social-ecological systems with strong human-nature interactions. They are able to provide relevant information about how global and local scale drivers (e.g., climate change, land use change) impact biodiversity and ecosystem services. Here we develop a framework that uses an ecosystem-focused approach to support managers in identifying essential variables in an integrated and scalable approach. We advocate that this approach can complement current essential variable developments, by allowing conservation managers to draw on system-level knowledge and theory of biodiversity and ecosystems to identify locally important variables that meet the local or sub-global needs for conservation data. This requires the development of system narratives and causal diagrams that pinpoints the social-ecological variables that represent the state and drivers of the different components, and their relationships. We describe a scalable framework that builds on system based narratives to describe all system components, the models used to represent them and the data needed. Considering the global distribution of protected areas, with an investment in standards, transparency, and on active data mobilisation strategies for essential variables, these have the potential to be the backbone of global biodiversity monitoring, benefiting countries, biodiversity observation networks and the global biodiversity community.

Changes in climate and land use are modifying biodiversity worldwide. Yet it remains unclear how both drivers interact to structure communities and determine patterns in taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional diversity at local scales. We focused on bird diversity and asked: how do precipitation and forest cover gradients interactively structure these elements of avian diversity?

Gear restrictions are an important management tool in small-scale tropical fisheries, improving sustainability and building resilience to climate change. Yet to identify the management challenges and complete footprint of individual gears, a broader systems approach is required that integrates ecological, economic and social sciences. Here we apply this approach to artisanal fish fences, intensively used across three oceans, to identify a previously underrecognized gear requiring urgent management attention. A longitudinal case study shows increased effort matched with large declines in catch success and corresponding reef fish abundance. We find fish fences to disrupt vital ecological connectivity, exploit &rt 500 species with high juvenile removal, and directly damage seagrass ecosystems with cascading impacts on connected coral reefs and mangroves. As semi-permanent structures in otherwise open-access fisheries, they create social conflict by assuming unofficial and unregulated property rights, while their unique high-investment-low-effort nature removes traditional economic and social barriers to overfishing.

Free-flowing rivers (FFRs) support diverse, complex and dynamic ecosystems globally, providing important societal and economic services. Infrastructure development threatens the ecosystem processes, biodiversity and services that these rivers support. Here we assess the connectivity status of 12 million kilometres of rivers globally and identify those that remain free-flowing in their entire length. Only 37 percent of rivers longer than 1,000 kilometres remain free-flowing over their entire length and 23 percent flow uninterrupted to the ocean. Very long FFRs are largely restricted to remote regions of the Arctic and of the Amazon and Congo basins. In densely populated areas only few very long rivers remain free-flowing, such as the Irrawaddy and Salween. Dams and reservoirs and their up- and downstream propagation of fragmentation and flow regulation are the leading contributors to the loss of river connectivity. By applying a new method to quantify riverine connectivity and map FFRs, we provide a foundation for concerted global and national strategies to maintain or restore them.

Community-based natural resource management programs can recover wildlife and deliver tangible benefits such as financial gains to local communities. Less-tangible impacts like changes in attitudes towards wildlife are not as well-understood, yet in the long-term, positive attitudes may be an important determinant of sustainability in such programs. We investigated the connection between actual and perceived benefits of a community-based conservation program in Namibia and residents' attitudes towards wildlife. We administered a questionnaire with a specific focus on attitudes to >400 community members across 18 communal conservancies that generated either (i) high benefits from tourism, (ii) high benefits from hunting, or (iii) low/no benefits. We used an empirical modelling approach that isolated the impact of conservancy-level benefits, while controlling for a variety of factors that can also influence attitudes towards wildlife. Using an information theoretic and model-averaging approach, we show that all else equal, respondents living in conservancies generating high benefits from hunting had more favourable attitudes towards wildlife than those living in conservancies generating low benefits (as expected), but also as compared to those living in conservancies generating high benefits from tourism. A variety of individual-level characteristics, such as the costs and benefits (both tangible and intangible) that respondents have personally experienced from wildlife, as well as demographic factors, were also important in conditioning attitudes. Our results demonstrate that community-based conservation programs can positively impact attitudes towards wildlife, but that this is conditioned by the type and magnitude of benefits and costs that individuals experience from wildlife, all of which should be assessed in order to most effectively support such programs.

As conservation shifts to meet the challenges of our globalized world, approaches for planning and evaluating interventions must evolve to account for the increasing complexity of conservation problems and the dynamic, multiscalar relationships between humans and the environment. Systems thinking offers approaches that could help conservation be more adaptive, transparent, and evidence-based. Using case studies and the literature, we trace the evolution of systems thinking and demonstrate how systems mapping could support the process of planning and evaluating interventions. Systems mapping helps disentangle the context of conservation and encourage collaborative planning that integrates diverse views. It can also change the way interventions are characterized and communicated by emphasizing the systems targeted for change as opposed to actions. Last, it can encourage evidence-based decision-making by identifying indicators attune to complexity, prompting discussion on knowledge gaps, and filling gaps through qualitative mapping or computational modeling. Integrating systems thinking in practice will help practitioners foster the capacity for learning and adaptation required for conservation to deliver global results.

Ocean ecosystems are in decline, yet we also have more ocean data, and more data portals, than ever before. To make effective decisions regarding ocean management, especially in the face of global environmental change, we need to make the best use possible of these data. Yet many data are not shared, are hard to find, and cannot be effectively accessed. We identify three classes of challenges to data sharing and use: uploading, aggregating, and navigating. While tremendous advances have occurred to improve ocean data operability and transparency, the effect has been largely incremental. We propose a suite of both technical and cultural solutions to overcome these challenges including the use of natural language processing, automatic data translation, ledger-based data identifiers, digital community currencies, data impact factors, and social networks as ways of breaking through these barriers. One way to harness these solutions could be a combinatorial machine that embodies both technological and social networking solutions to aggregate ocean data and to allow researchers to discover, navigate, and download data as well as to connect researchers and data users while providing an open-sourced backend for new data tools.

Stable forests — those not already significantly disturbed nor facing predictable near-future risks of anthropogenic disturbance — may play a large role in the climate solution, due to their carbon sequestration and storage capabilities. Their importance is recognized by the Paris Agreement, but stable forests have received comparatively little attention through existing forest protection mechanisms and finance. Instead, emphasis has been placed on targeting locations where deforestation and forest degradation are happening actively. Yet stopping deforestation and forest degradation does not guarantee durable success, especially outside the geographic scope of targeted efforts. As a result, today's stable forests may be at risk without additional efforts to secure their long-term conservation.