FAR-sighted conservation: Facing the inevitability of ongoing environmental change

Chris Thomas and colleagues describe their latest Perspective article outlining a new framework – Facilitate-Accept-Resist (FAR) – that operationalizes conservation decision-making in a way that leads to greater adoption of positive biodiversity change. Conservation is in a bind. The biological world is changing, and so are our human priorities. When we declare a nature reserve on the basis of a particular species, for example, is … Continue reading FAR-sighted conservation: Facing the inevitability of ongoing environmental change

Making optimal adaptive management accessible to everyone

Author Sam Nicol describes his team’s latest research developing a new model to help managers easily identify and employ adaptive management interventions to protect threatened species. Adaptive management—what’s the problem? Adaptive management has been the coolest thing in conservation for almost 40 years – everyone wants to do it. Way back in the ‘80s, the elegant seminal formulations by Hollings and Walters proposed that conservation … Continue reading Making optimal adaptive management accessible to everyone

A decision support tool to prioritize ballast water compliance monitoring by ranking risk of non-indigenous species establishment

Each year, Journal of Applied Ecology awards the Southwood Prize to the best paper in the journal by an author at the start of their career. In this post, Dr. Johanna Bradie (University of Windsor, Canada) discusses her shortlisted paper which reports the development of a decision support tool, known as a ballast water invasion probability tool, which automatically quantifies the risk of non-indigenous species associated with … Continue reading A decision support tool to prioritize ballast water compliance monitoring by ranking risk of non-indigenous species establishment