Why Monitor the Environment? - A Decision Science Approach

Free public event with Hugh Possingham

Click HERE to download the podcast of this event.

Professor Hugh Possingham is currently the Director of the Ecology Centre at The University of Queensland.  Hugh has over 290 publications, 5300 Web of Science citations and a lab of 32 students and staff.  Work from his lab helped stop land clearing ("the Brigalow Declaration") in Queensland and NSW securing at least 1 billion tonnes of CO2.

We generally assume that all monitoring is good. However there are numerous examples of people monitoring things to extinction and monitoring with no clear objective. Hugh Possingham will present a completely different way of looking at environmental monitoring - using decision science thinking. This approach enables us to work out how much of our precious budget should be spent monitoring, if any! The problem with existing monitoring, aside from doing too little, is that ecologists have been trained within a classical null hypothesis testing framework - great for pure science, rubbish for solving environmental problems.

Hugh's powerpoint presentation is now available click here to access.