Our research focuses on delivering research that informs conservation decisions that improve ecosystems and the communities they support. Everyone is a decision maker – we make decisions constantly in our daily life. Many decisions are subconscious – “I’ll pick the brand of soup that is on sale today”. Others are deliberate and structured – “How do I pick which University to attend”.  Conservation decision making uses a logic based decision making approach, that many of us naturally apply in our daily lives, and translates it into an explicit and transparent process for conservation. This makes sure that we spend our limited resources to maximize conservation outcomes and it also helps us to design conservation programs that are context appropriate and likely to succeed. Our research tackles multiple aspects of the decision making process, including:

• Ecological modelling – building dynamic system models to improve our understanding of the ecosystems we want to conserve.
• Social and economic aspects of conservation – Using social science and economics to understand the human dimensions of conservation problems.
• Decision theory – using the best available planning frameworks and tools to solve big conservation problems.