Thursday, December 10, 2015

11:00 AM - 11:30 AM

The Shine Dome

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Overview

Hugh Possingham

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Details

Formulating and solving biodiversity conservation problems Hugh P. Possingham, ARC Laureate Fellow, School of Maths and Physics, and School of Biological Sciences, Director - ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions, The University of Queensland, Brisbane 4072, AUSTRALIA h.possingham@uq.edu.au Conservation science is booming and as it matures many of its components are becoming more quantitative. Traditionally most conservation scientists have had quantitative training in statistics and sometimes basic applied mathematics. They rarely, if ever, are trained in operations research. This leaves a huge gap in the field – particular when one recognizes that conservation is an applied science that is all about achieving conservation outcomes within a constrained budget. In this talk I will discuss how we have been formulating and solving nature conservation problems – most of which have never been formulated before. In particular I will discuss: 1) how to allocate resources across the globe to minimize species loss 2) how monitoring is first and foremost an optimization problem, not a statistical problem; and 3) how our software, Marxan http://www.uq.edu.au/marxan/, is being used to create marine and terrestrial reserve systems in over 110 countries. The tools we have used to formulate and solve these problems are fairly standard– differential equations, optimal control theory, integer linear programming and simulated annealing. For each example I will define the problem verbally, then mathematically, with a brief discussion of results. The focus of the examples will be on problem formulation because I have found that the most significant challenge is formulating the correct problem and communicating the approach to end users. These, and other issues, are discussed in an informal way in our centre’s monthly magazine – “Decision Point” – http://www.decision-point.com.au/

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Speaker