Hybrid ecological models to inform management and conservation decisions in production landscapes

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This Discovery Grant will fund a research program focused on the study of landscapes as complex environmental systems and the incorporation of methods from complex systems studies into current resource management and conservation approaches. One important aspect of landscape complexity is the multitude of connections and interactions between different human and ecological components. Due to a lack of appropriate methods of system analysis to deal with all of these interactions, such complexity is often ignored or disregarded by current models and management approaches. One solution to this challenge may be to represent a landscape as a network, in which human and ecological components are nodes, and flows of material, energy or information between components are links. The objective of the proposed research is thus to create novel network-based models of landscapes and to develop new quantitative methods to analyse the structure of these networks. This approach will build on cutting edge methods in complex network analysis and may provide new insight into the structural configurations of landscapes that are most important for sustainability, resilience or biodiversity conservation. The methods will be applied to two case studies: a) the Eyre Peninsula, which is a largely agricultural system in South Australia, and b) a section of managed boreal forest in Quebec's "Cote Nord" region. The network models will be used to inform ecosystem management and biological conservation decisions in the two regions, providing managers with powerful tools to assess the potential cumulative effects of human and natural drivers of change on these landscapes. By providing novel, cross-disciplinary tools and approaches for studying landscapes as complex systems this research program will significantly advance quantitative methods in the field of environmental science. The research will also contribute to informing managers and stakeholders about the complex interactions within a landscape and the need to take a whole-systems approach to environmental management.