Program 1

This program is led by Prof. Graeme Cumming in his capacity as WA Premier’s Science Fellow. It asks how protected areas interact with their surrounding landscapes and whether protected areas are sources of longer-term social and ecological resilience.

Setting aside areas for biodiversity protection has ecological, economic, and social consequences. These consequences occur both inside and outside protected areas. For example, if fish numbers inside a marine protected area increase due to protection from fishing, fishing will improve outside the boundaries of the protected area. This is called a spillover effect. Spillovers can also be social and economic, for example if protected areas create employment and support local industries.

Protected areas influence social-ecological dynamics over larger areas than they occupy, creating flows of resources and people that in turn create feedbacks to protected areas themselves. Improved fishing success, for example, can influence the number of people fishing and the kinds of fishing gear they use; the economic returns from commercial fishing; and the wellbeing of nearby human communities.

Research under this program has two tightly connected objectives. The first focuses on identifying and measuring spillover effects and their consequences, modelling the feedback dynamics of spillovers, and exploring the implications of spillovers for practical concerns such as where to create protected areas, how to make biodiversity protection resilient to climate change, and how to improve regional social-ecological resilience. This research is currently funded mainly by the Premier's Science Fellowship and a partnership with the Minderoo Foundation.

The second objective focuses more directly on understanding the social-ecological dynamics of protected areas and their resilience. It uses a comparative approach and a 'minimal model' based on the Coupled Infrastructure Systems Framework to describe, compare, and model protected areas. This research is being undertaken in collaboration with colleagues in South Africa at the University of Stellenbosch and is currently funded by the Australian Research Council's Discovery Program and the German Integrative Biodiversity Synthesis Centre, iDiv.