Ian Boyd is a Professor in Biology at the University of St Andrews. He is Director of the Scottish Oceans Institute and the NERC Sea Mammal Research Unit. He has been chairman of the Marine Alliance for Science and Technology for Scotland (MASTS) and was Chief Executive of SMRU Ltd. His research field is in marine ecology with a specialisation in marine mammals and he has gained awards for his research in polar science, zoology and marine science. He led a UK research programme in Antarctica for 14 years, has led several international research projects as chief scientist, and he is an adviser to the Government about issues concerning marine management. He has degrees from the Universities of Aberdeen and Cambridge, is a Fellow of the Society for Biology and The Royal Society of Edinburgh, and he is a member of the Scottish Science Advisory Council. He is a holder of the Bruce Medal for polar science. He has also served on two inquiries in to the future of Scottish fisheries and chairs a Scientific Advisory Board on offshore decommissioning for Oil and Gas UK. He has published over 150 peer reviewed science articles and 9 books as author or editor. He is also on the editorial advisory Board of Science.

Marine conservation challenges for the next century

Ian L Boyd

Scottish Oceans Institute, University of St Andrews, UK

The marine environment is the next great frontier for industrial development. In his book,Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith explained how human society operates around the ownership of capital. A challenge for conservation over the next century is to turn the human predilection for capital accrual to an advantage. The idea widely held in conservation thatnatural capital should be in common ownership may have to change. The greatest contrast between the marine environment and elsewhere is that there is common ownership of resources and many resources are spatially and temporally highly transient. Consequently, we have demonstrated singular failure to managemarine natural capital that is in common ownership and most indicators suggest this failure will continue. Codifying common ownership throughinstruments like the Common Fisheries Policy counteracts the natural tendency for individuals to accrue capital and to manage that capital wisely. Common ownership does not equate to a public shareholding. In future, increasing marine industrial development will result in cumulative harmful effects and could generate ecosystem collapse which is in nobody’s interest. Preventing this is the greatest challenge for the next century. Experience shows that systems of common ownership do not work.

Ilkka Hanski’s studies – on animals ranging from butterflies, dung beetles and water fleas to voles, lemmings and bears – have made metapopulation ecology a substantial research area. The aim of the research is to elucidate the conditions that allow species to persist in fragmented landscapes but also to examine the genetic and evolutionary consequences of habitat fragmentation. Today, Hanski’s metapopulation theories are among the cornerstones of research on biodiversity, and the metapopulation concept and models have a bearing on practical management of the natural environment and on conservation policy.

Professor Hanski was awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences the 2011 Crafoord Prize in Biosciences for his pioneering studies on how spatial variation affects plants and animals. He is also a foreign member of the Royal Society of London and the US National Academy of Sciences.

Extinction threshold in fragmented landscapes

Ilkka Hanski

University of Helsinki, Finland

Habitat loss and fragmentation continues to be the greatest threat to biodiversity in Europe and worldwide. Innumerable populations become completely isolated, and their viability is threatened by demographic and environmental stochasticities and accumulation of deleterious mutations. Nonetheless, species may survive in networks of even small habitat fragments if the colonization rate exceeds the extinction rate when the species is rare at the landscape level. I describe an example for the Glanville fritillary butterfly and for forest-inhabiting small mammals. Ecologists have debated what matters most for the viability of species living in fragmented landscapes, the total amount or the spatial configuration of the remaining habitat. Spatial fragmentation becomes increasingly important towards the extinction threshold, at which point viability is lost. Importantly, time to extinction is especially long when the new equilibrium following habitat loss and fragmentation is close to the extinction threshold. Therefore, the extinction debt following environmental change can be expected to be especially large in communities with many rare (endangered) species, which means that we are likely to underestimate the level of threat imposed by habitat loss and fragmentation.

Hugh Possingham has championed the role of decision science in conservation. His group developed Marxan – a conservation planning software – and first used it to help re-zone the Great Barrier Reef. It is now used in over 110 countries to build marine and terrestrial spatial conservation plans. Other decision-making tools influence spending on threatened species, pest and weed eradication and the way people monitor. Aside from his day job, Hugh has a variety of broader public roles advising policy makers and managers sitting on 16 committees and boards outside the University. He and Dr Barry Traill wrote “The Brigalow Declaration”, used by the Queensland Government to save over 20 million hectares of forest and woodland.

Hugh is Professor of Biology and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Queensland and Director of The Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions. In 2005 he was elected to the Australian Academy of Science. He has published over 300 Web of Science listed papers. Hugh suffers from an incurable disease - birdwatching.

Australia's system of marine protected areas, Marxan, and a new metric for conservation representation

Hugh Possingham, Lissa Barr and Matt Watts

Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions,

The University of Queensland, Australia

In the 1990s, under the leadership of Senator Robert Hill, the then Minister for The Environment, Australia embarked on a process of building a representative marine reserve system in its exclusive economic zone (an area about 80% of the size of Europe). The highly successful rezoning of the Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest systematically designed system of protected areas, was followed by a poor rezoning of Australia's SE marine waters where only half a percent of the continental shelf was protected in no-take areas. Proposals for rezoning the remainder of the region are currently under consideration and should be resolved by the time of this conference. Here we discuss the science and politics of Australia’s experience. We introduce a new metric for determining the level of representation of reserve systems and apply that metric to the recent and proposed plans. There will be some discussion of technical advances in the software Marxan, the decision support tool that has underpinned most of the rezoning.

Peter Vitousek is a Clifford G. Morrison Professor in Population and Resource Studies at the Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University.

The Vitousek Group carry out research on ecosystems, including understanding the processes that maintain soil fertility and plant productivity in tropical forests, evaluating interactions between ecosystems and societies in the Pacific (prior to European contact), and using the Hawaiian Islands as a model system to understand how the world works. Much of his research has focused on biological invasions and human-caused changes in the global nitrogen cycle as components of contemporary global environmental change. In the course of our work, he has made a systematic effort to reach out to the Hawaiian public.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA from 1992. He won the prestigious Japan Prize in 2010 for his contributions to biological production and the environment; he was named by CNN and TIME magazine as one of America's Best in Science and Medicine.

Islands, invasions, conservation, and sustainability

Peter Vitousek

Stanford University, United States

Oceanic islands have long represented important model systems for evolution, ecology, conservation, and culture. Their value is particularly clear in the Pacific, where Polynesians in particular represented a single people and culture that discovered and colonized numerous and diverse islands. In doing so they transported a suite of plants and animals, and their actions and the invaders they brought transformed island ecosystems, causing substantial land use change and multiple extinctions. At the same time, the disparate features of the islands that Polynesians colonized influenced their societies - which diverged substantially in their very different islands. In most places, Polynesians developed diverse systems of intensive agriculture and animal husbandry; in some places, they made a further transition to more sustainable resource use. Polynesian islands have now been incorporated into the global economic system, and their lands and cultures have been altered substantially as a consequence. Nevertheless, these islands still present important opportunities for conservation - in the biological and cultural diversity they support, and as models for dealing with multiple interacting threats to species, ecosystems, and cultures.

 

Professor Watson’s career has evolved from research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory: California Institute of Technology, to a US Federal Government programs manager/director at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), to a scientific/policy advisor in the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), White House, to a scientific advisor, manager and chief scientist at the World Bank, to a Chair of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, the Director for Strategic Direction for the Tyndall centre, and Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. In parallel to his formal positions he has chaired, co-chaired or directed international scientific, technical and economic assessments of stratospheric ozone depletion, biodiversity/ecosystems (the GBA and MA), climate change (IPCC) and agricultural S&T (IAASTD). Professor Watson’s areas of expertise include managing and coordinating national and international environmental programmes, research programmes and assessments; establishing science and environmental policies - specifically advising governments and civil society on the policy implications of scientific information and policy options for action; and communicating scientific, technical and economic information to policymakers. During the last twenty years he has received numerous national and international awards recognising his contributions to science and the science-policy interface, including in 2003 - Honorary “Companion of the Order of Saint Michael and Saint George” from the United Kingdom; 2010 – the Blue Planet Prize and 2011 being elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Making better policy by involving science – lessons from the MA, UK NEA and the emerging IPBES

Biodiversity, ecosystems and their services are constantly changing due to demographic, economic, socio-political, technological & behavioural pressures, which influence the demand for goods and services and the management of natural resources. These pressures manifest themselves through changes in land-use, exploitation of natural resources, invasive species, air and water pollution and climate change.

National (UK National Ecosystem Assessment) and international (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment) assessments have been influential in policy formulation at the respective levels by providing credible, peer-reviewed knowledge as the basis for informed policy formulation, identifying what is known, what is unknown, what is controversial and what is uncertain. In each case the assessments addressed: (i) the underlying science, (ii) the impacts of the loss of biodiversity and degradation of ecosystem services, on socio-economic sectors, human health and human well-being; and (iii) the economic implications of the degradation of ecosystem services, and the policy, technological and behavioural approaches to, reduce the loss of biodiversity and degradation of ecosystem services, including drivers such as climate change. The assessments looked back 50 years and forward 50 years using a range of plausible futures. The assessments were policy relevant but not policy prescriptive.