Making better conservation decisions
Our research aims to deliver practical solutions to biodiversity conservation research and practice. We aim to create conservation tools in collaboration with partners to develop protection and stewardship solutions. We research how to better use community science and modelling to monitor and protect biodiversity, focusing on issues like species invasions and population declines in migratory species and species-at-risk.
We emphasize the importance of learning and implementing Indigenous rights, values, knowledge and practices into all aspects of conservation and fostering respectful and meaningful collaborations. This philosophy shapes our commitment to ethical conservation practices and collaborative partnerships.
We’re always happy to collaborate, so if you think we can help with something, please get in touch!
Optimal biodiversity monitoring
The urgent need to conserve biodiversity using current knowledge must be carefully balanced with the necessity to gather additional information to inform action. Within our lab, a key research focus centers on evaluating trade-offs of acquiring new data and employing biodiversity monitoring methods to inform actionable conservation measures. Some current and past projects include:
- Using value of information (VOI) techniques to help decide when we should gather more information and when it makes sense to act on the information we have (see e.g.: ).
- Maximizing the benefits of citizen science for informing conservation actions (see e.g.: , , ).
Conservation prioritization
Our research aims to provide conservation agencies with useful tools that allow them to achieve better results within their limited budgets. Some projects include:
- , a suite of user-friendly conservation tools for protection and stewardship decisions we constructed with the Nature Conservancy of Canada.
- Tools to optimize conservation of places, threats, or species (e.g. and )
Research for evidence-informed conservation policy and action
We strive to undertake ecological and social research to help improve Canadian environmental policy. Some example projects include:
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- Predicting the trajectories of species invasions, and optimizing management to prevent invasive species impacts (see e.g.:聽 听补苍诲 .)
- Determining optimal conservation action choice (see e.g.: )
- Helping to show the importance of conservation partnerships with Indigenous landowners (ongoing)
- Predicting the number and locations of remaining occurrences of threatened species (see e.g.: and ).
- Helping evaluate and determine appropriate conservation mechanisms (see e.g.: ).