Fellowship on predicting coastal ecological futures in an era of unprecedented change

We are entering a new era of science where ecosystem change is uncharted by historical observations. Observations are the foundation of predictive science, so how can we predict a future that is outside the envelope of the environments?

This is the question I am addressing in a 2021 Australian Research Council Future Fellowship. Specifically, I will focus on predicting future change for coastal ecosystems.

Watch a short video about the project

Humanities footprint on the Earth’s ecosystem has never been greater. The oceans are increasingly being industrialized, and climate change means the footprint of human economic activity now touches even the most remote ecosystems.

Coastal ecosystems exemplify the challenges we face in managing our growing impacts. Coasts are the thin line on which much of the human population and industrial activity rests. This human activity places great pressures on coastal ecosystems, and in many places, we are losing species and the ecological functions that support human livelihoods, like fisheries.

Predicting the future for coastal ecosystems is critical for creating a sustainable relationship between humanity and nature. Ecological predictions allow us to identify options for better managing our relationship with ecosystems.

Reliable predictions are needed to help managers mitigate the risks of future human activities to the environment. In this four-year fellowship I will lead a team to develop new modelling techniques for predicting ecosystem change.

A couple of key research outputs to date

In Assessing predictive accuracy of species abundance models in dynamic systems (published Methods in Ecology and Evolution 2025) I show how we can validate models in rapidly changing environments. We show that the quality of prediction degrades (and errors get bigger) in ecosystems that are undergoing rapid change from climate change and invasive species.

In Projecting Uncertainty in Ecosystem Persistence Under Climate Change (published Global Change Biology 2025) we developed a method to estimate probabilities of mangrove persistence using global datasets. This gives us a way to measure uncertainty that we can use to guide conservation decisions, e.g. to identify where management actions are most likely to succeed. This research shows a new way to handle ecosystem predictions under climate change. Instead of false precision, we quantify what we know and don’t know. For mangroves, significant seaward losses are likely, but landward gains and conservation success remain possible with strategic action. R