Professor Bob Pressey

Leader Program 6: Conservation Planning for a Sustainable Future

Bob Pressey

 

Professor, James Cook University (2007-); Thomas Jefferson Visiting Professor, University of Virginia (2007); Professorial Research Fellow, University of Queensland (2006-2007); Principal Research Scientist, New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service (1999-2005); Research Scientist, NPWS (1986-1999); private environmental consultant (1979-1986).

Research Interests
Select Publications

 


Research Interests

My group works on diverse issues relevant to conservation planning, ranging from theory and mathematical modelling to the social, economic and political aspects of implementing conservation action in the sea and on the ground. These research areas can be grouped into five broad subprograms.

Conservation planning in a changing world. Conservation planning methods have become effective at planning for snapshots of biodiversity pattern such as maps of habitats and species records. Some important challenges remain in planning to promote the persistence of a wide variety of biodiversity processes, including population dynamics, dispersal, regular migrations, patch dynamics of resources and disturbance, adjustment of distributions to climate change and ongoing diversification of lineages. Conservation planning must also deal better with threats to biodiversity and ecosystem services posed by human use of natural resources. Part of the solution is to predict changes in the distribution and intensity of threats and part is to devise effective planning responses to dynamic threats. This subprogram will address both sets of issues and their interactions.

Integrated coastal planning. Managers of coastal catchments face enormous challenges in allocating limited conservation resources. These include the need for adequate information on which to base investment decisions and the complex tradeoffs between competing demands for resources. Some of these tradeoffs concern choices between features to be managed: rare species, habitats, connectivity and ecosystem services in terrestrial, freshwater and marine environments. Other tradeoffs concern kinds of conservation action: protection or restoration of native species or best-practice land uses. This subprogram will complement the research and management activities of other organisations in north Queensland and the Asia-Pacific region generally to develop the required data sets and explicit frameworks for effective decision-making.

Reconciling conservation values and economics. The effectiveness of conservation action is always limited by the available financial resources. Also, conservation action often constrains human uses of natural resources. The real-world challenges faced by this subprogram include estimating the costs of effective conservation action that achieves explicit objectives, minimizing the impacts of effective conservation on human uses of natural resources, guiding the allocation of different conservation actions that vary both in their costs and effectiveness for achieving conservation objectives, and devising financial incentives for conservation.

New decision-support systems for sustainable management. About two decades of developing software for conservation planning has led to some innovative decision-support systems that have been used widely by scientists and practitioners. Some remaining needs are for highly interactive software tools that show spatial options for achieving conservation objectives while also accounting for connectivity of areas, variable conservation costs, and estimates of return on investment. This subprogram will build on past work to develop new software systems that will be designed in collaboration with conservation practitioners.

Implementation of conservation action with stakeholders. One of the frontier areas in conservation planning is the effective integration of technical tasks with the opportunities and constraints posed by  the social, economic and political characteristics of regions. This subprogram will use a detailed, generic description of the entire process of conservation planning to identify the requirements for better implementation of conservation action in the sea and on the land. This will include improved approaches to engaging with agencies, non-government organisations, statutory authorities and community groups. My group will test and apply these approaches in coastal Queensland and in selected study regions in the Asia-Pacific region.

 

Select Publications

Pressey, R.L., Cabeza, M., Watts, M.E. Cowling, R.M. and Wilson, K.A. 2007. Conservation planning in a changing world. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 22, 583-592. Link to full text or pdf

Linke, S., Pressey, R.L., Bailey, R.C. and Norris, R.H. 2007. Management options for river conservation planning: condition and conservation re-visited. Freshwater Biology 52, 918-938.

Sarkar, S., Pressey, R.L., Faith, D.P., Margules, C.R., Fuller, T., Stoms, D.M., Moffett, A., Wilson, K., Williams, K.J., Williams, P.H. and Andelman, S. 2006. Biodiversity conservation planning tools: present status and challenges for the future. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 31, 123-159.

Wilson, K., Pressey, R.L., Newton, A., Burgman, M., Possingham, H. and Weston, C. 2005. Measuring and incorporating vulnerability into conservation planning. Environmental Management 35, 527-543.

Pressey, R.L. 2004. Conservation planning and biodiversity: assembling the best data for the job. Conservation Biology 18, 1677-1681.

Pressey, R.L., Watts, M.E. and Barrett, T.W. 2004. Is maximizing protection the same as minimizing loss? Efficiency and retention as alternative measures of the effectiveness of proposed reserves. Ecology Letters 7, 1035-1046.

Pressey, R.L., Cowling, R.M. and Rouget, M. 2003. Formulating conservation targets for biodiversity pattern and process in the Cape Floristic Region, South Africa. Biological Conservation 112, 99-127.

Cowling, R.M. and Pressey, R.L. 2001. Rapid plant diversification: planning for an evolutionary future. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 98, 5452-5457.

Margules, C.R. and Pressey, R.L. 2000. Systematic conservation planning. Nature 405, 243-253.