Emily Nicholson

The role of monitoring in wildlife conservation: A fundamental component of successful resource management is monitoring. The aim of this project is to develop a framework for optimal monitoring of conservation activities, integrating both monitoring for compliance and monitoring for detection of biodiversity trends. A robust monitoring strategy must consider the goals of the programme, the type of monitoring that is most effective, and the overall level of investment. This project draws upon and integrates many disciplines, including ecological models of species and ecosystems, socio-economic models of human decision-making and behaviour, optimal monitoring, and decision making under uncertainty. The project will focus on community-based conservation, where local communities are granted control over resources, including monitoring biodiversity trends and compliance with rules. The proposed framework is however highly relevant to a wide range of management situations, such as international fisheries regulation and water management. We are developing a model framework that integrates the dynamics of socio-economic and ecological systems, to explore the effectiveness and efficiency of monitoring strategies that target resource users’ behaviour and populations of conserved species. We will apply the framework to case studies in Madagascar, in collaboration with E.J. Milner-Gulland, Julia Jones, Matt Somerville, Aidan Keane, and Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, and funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

Conservation planning for species persistence: I completed my PhD in 2006 in the Spatial Ecology Lab, part of the University of Queensland's Ecology Centre, supervisored by Professor Hugh Possingham (University of Queensland), Bob Pressey (JCU) and Wayne Rochester (CSIRO Marine). During my PhD I examined the use of measures of persistence in multiple species conservation planning. I developed a method for optimising landscapes for the persistence of metapopulations for multiple species, to account for the impact on species viability of the amount, quality and spatial configuration of habitat in a reserve network. One key consideration is the objectives of conservation when considering the viability of multiple species. How do these decision change given the uncertainty that is inherent in the decision process? Is it possible to make a decision given the uncertainty? I am currently exploring the implications of planning for multiple species: how robust are our decisions to choices made in the decision-making process, such as the species selected and objectives used?

Uncertainty in decision-making for conservation: Conservation decisions are inevitable made with incomplete and uncertain data, and based on uncertain models. Therefore better tools and frameworks are needed that take the uncertainty into account, and to find solutions that are robust to uncertainty. This is a focus of our current work in Madagascar. As part of my PhD research I applied information-gap decision theory, a methods developed by Yakov Ben-Haim, to multi-species conservation planning (see papers to download pdf).

Conservation planning and reserve design: As well as developing new tools for conservation planning, I have also gained experience in existing conservation planning tools, including Marxan, developed by Ian R. Ball and Hugh Possingham, and C-Plan, the conservation planning tool developed by New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service (NSW NPWS). In my previous post-doc, I worked with David Wilcove (Princeton University). in collaboration with Florida Chapter of The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and Florida Natural Areas Inventory (FNAI) to develop methods for assessing conservation progress and priorities in Florida. We assessed the current protection status of 180 species and 30 ecological communities, as well as the potential conservation gains of alternative land acquisition plans, including the Florida Forever programme.

Conservation status of ecological communities: Government and non-government agencies are increasingly interested in assessing the threat status of ecological communities as a key part of conservation planning. Such assessments have proved difficult, however, due to a lack of agreed- criteria, and conceptual difficulties in the definition and recognition of communities. We reviewed several currently available methods for assessing the status of communities that use quantitative criteria and thresholds, proposed by governments, non-government organizations and by researchers. We compared them to one another and to the IUCN Red List criteria for assessing species’ risk of extinction using three key assessment criteria: decline in distribution; current restricted distribution; and disruption to ecological processes. This work is in preparation and in collaboration with David Keith (NSW Dept. of Environment and Climate Change, NSW, Australia) and David Wilcove (Princeton University).

E. Nicholson & O. Ovaskainen (in press) Conservation prioritization using metapopulation models. In: Spatial conservation prioritisation: quantitative methods and computational tools (eds. Moilanen A, Possingham HP & Wilson KA). Oxford University Press, Oxford

S. Beissinger, E. Nicholson & H.P. Possingham (2008) Application of population viability analysis to landscape conservation planning. In: Models For Planning Wildlife Conservation In Large Landscapes (eds. Millspaugh JJ & Thompson FR). Elsevier Science, The Netherlands

Possingham, H. P., and E. Nicholson (2007). Principles of landscape design that emerge from a formal problem-solving approach. Pages 520-535 in D. B. Lindenmayer, and R. J. Hobbs, editors. Managing and designing landscapes for conservation: moving from perspectives to principles. Blackwell, Malden, MA.

E. Nicholson & H. P. Possingham (2007) Making conservation decisions under uncertainty for the persistence of multiple species. Ecological Applications 17 (1): 251-265.

E. Nicholson & H. P. Possingham (2006) Objectives for multiple species conservation planning. Conservation Biology 20 (3): 871-881.

E. Nicholson, M. I. Westphal, K. Frank , W. A. Rochester, R. L. Pressey, D. Lindenmayer & H. P. Possingham (2006) A new method for conservation planning for the persistence of multiple species. Ecology Letters 9 (9): 1049-1060.

E. Nicholson, J. F. Ryan, D. Hodgkins (2002) Community data: where does the value lie? Assessing confidence limits of community collected water quality data. Water Science & Technology 45 (11): 193-200.

Nicholson E., Keith D.A. & Wilcove D.S. (in review) Assessing the conservation status of ecological communities. under review at Conservation Biology

Nicholson E., Lindenmayer D.B., Frank K. & Possingham H.P. (in prep) Testing the focal species approach to conservation planning for species persistence.

E. Nicholson, A. Knight & D.S. Wilcove (2007) Assessing portfolio effectiveness and predicting outcomes in ecoregional conservation planning. In. The Nature Conservancy, Gainesville, Florida.