Improving natural resource management decision making and policy

The ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions (CEED), at The University of Queensland, led by Professor Kerrie Wilson, is a world-leading research centre that is pushing the frontiers of environmental decision science.

Research undertaken by CEED is helping managers, policy makers, non-government organisations and other researchers to make better-informed decisions about natural resource management.

Historically, the practice of conservation planning has not been systematic and new reserves have often been located in places that do not contribute to the representation of biodiversity.

CEED researchers are changing this, thanks in part to their work developing and improving a specialist conservation planning software tool, called Marxan¹. Marxan is used to solve environmental management problems and evaluate the outcomes of environmental actions, by incorporating the best scientific information to make the costs and benefits of alternative decisions clear.

Marxan has now been applied to hundreds of spatial conservation planning problems around the world and CEED researchers are using it to assist stakeholder driven decision-making processes.

For example, collaboration between CEED researchers and the Malaysian Government resulted in the creation of Malaysia’s biggest marine protected area. The software allowed information provided by local communities to be used to help decide which areas should be protected and which should remain open for different kinds of fishing.

¹Marxan was initially co-developed by Ian Ball and Hugh Possingham at The University of Adelaide as part of Ian’s PhD at that institution. Professor Possingham and programmer Matt Watts developed Marxan further at The University of Queensland from 2004 to the present, funded by a wide variety of sources, especially the Australian Research Council and the National Environmental Science Program (Australian federal government). The Marxan family of tools continues to be developed, trained and applied by many CEED researchers in a wide diversity of partnerships.

In March 2017, CEED researchers—Professor Kerrie Wilson (current Centre Director), Professor Hugh Possingham (former Centre Director), and Dr Erik Meijaard—won Malaysia’s 2016 Mahathir Science Award which recognises scientists, institutions or organisations worldwide for tropical research that improves society’s well-being. In May 2017, Professor Wilson received the prestigious 2017 Australian Academy of Science Nancy Millis Medal for Women in Science, recognising her significant discoveries in the environmental sciences that have resulted in more effective conservation practices.

 

Image: Malaysian artisanal fishers, Northern Sabah. Image courtesy: M. Beger / ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions.