seascape models

More info on my talk at SCBO 2016

8 July 2016

This week I’m at the Society for Conservation Biology, Oceanea Conference in Brisbane.

I am speaking about our working group on Ridge to Reef planning for fisheries, in particular the work we are doing in Fiji.

One of the major challenges in ridge to reef planning is figuring out where the pollution you observe impacting a reef comes from. This problem is often solved using lots of data and modelling. However, such approaches are expensive and time consuming. We didn’t have the luxury of a lot of time or money, because in Fiji there is a limited window of opportunity to inform a major planning process.

The time-constraint forced us to come up with a new solution to the problem of tracing sediment to its sources. In brief we used a Bayesian model to uncover latent connections between ridge and reef ecosystems. The model relies on freely available satellite data and some commonly available local data for validation. It lets us link impacts in the ocean to their causes on land. We can use this model to help inform planning about where to protect forest, or restore forest on land.

I have submitted the ms, but am keen to get feed-back. You can read the pre-review ms here.

I also mentioned some work about conservation-fisheries trade-offs in my talk. The open access article on that can be found here.



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