Mathematics to improve environmental management

How to best feed the world?

Can we sustainably feed a rapidly growing global population? How do we eliminate hunger with the least environmental harm? Improving the management of harvested populations can play its part. However, we also need to better manage agriculture and livestock production. I am broadly interested in projects that tackle these questions using dynamical systems theory, optimisation, and data analysis.


Poaching and Illegal Wildlife Trade

Even the simplest ODE models of harvest can produce a rich set of population dynamics when we account for the motivations of humans hunting for and trading wildlife products. Conservation scientists have started using these models to inform policy to protect species against illegal harvest. We've shown that many models can produce dramatic bifurcations, with small changes in parameters or initial conditions driving healthy populations extinct. Yet, we have very few general rules for when we expect to see different types of mathematical behavior. This can be disastrous, as it is hard to determine whether the projected environmental outcomes are simply the result of numerical error, coding bugs, arbitrary model assumptions, or are robust and general across systems. One of my ongoing lines of research is to develop rigorous mathematical descriptions of population dynamics of harvested species within a broad class of mathematical models.


Fishery Sock Assessments

I regularly apply mathematical and statistical theory to improve fisheries management in collaboration with the Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries (DAF), and the Australian Fisheries Management Authority (AFMA). For example, I led the first stock assessment of coral trout, a collection of species (Plectropomus leopardus, P. maculatus, P. laevis), in the Torres Strait. Most of my fisheries management work focuses on methods for data-poor fisheries where the status of the fish stock is highly uncertain.