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 | Biography |  |
Conservation Ecologist Kerrie Wilson is an Australian Research Council Research Fellow, and Senior Lecturer at The University of Queensland. She is also a visiting professor at The University of Copenhagen and a European Commission Erasmus Fellow. Dr. Wilson is an associate editor of Diversity and Distributions and Conservation Letters, and is a member of the scientific committee for the Diversitas bioSustainability programme. She was a Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Research Fellow.
After completing her PhD in Conservation Biology at the University of Melbourne in collaboration with the UNEP-WCMC in Cambridge, Kerrie undertook post-doctoral research at the The Ecology Centre. She then took the role of Director of Conservation with The Nature Conservancy Australia program, before being awarded and ARC Research Fellowship and Senior Lectureship at UQ. Currently, she is an active collaborator with several research groups in Australia, South East Asia, Denmark, South Africa, the US, and Europe. Her research involves collaborations with government and non-government organizations.
Kerrie has a particular interest in applied conservation resource allocation problems, such as where to invest limited resources to protect biodiversity, to restore habitat, or manage systems. Her research program requires an understanding of both the ecological and socio-economic context and has lead to the development of frameworks and decision support tools to inform how funds should be allocated between different activities to maximise conservation outcomes. Her research program also focuses on the analysis of uncertainty (with a particular focus on the impact of climate change and other institutional and socio-political factors that influence the likelihood of investment success), landscape dynamics (e.g. the evaluation of land use scenarios and threatening processes), and biodiversity benefit (e.g. how to maximise resilience in restoration and ways to account for multiple benefits such as ecosystem service delivery).
Kerrie’s research programme in conservation ecology has incorporated ecological dynamics and economics into the identification of priority areas and actions for conservation and has resulted in new theory for how funds should be allocated. This theory and applications have been published in high level journals including Nature, Science, PLoS Biology, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It has resulted in a seminal review in the New York Academy of Sciences and a co-edited book published by Oxford University Press. Earlier research in the field of conservation planning was broadly focussed on investigating new ways to incorporate vulnerability (the likelihood of biodiversity loss due to land use changes) and the development of analytical approaches to quantify and represent data uncertainty (one of her first publications was awarded a Most Cited paper award from Biological Conservation).
Discussion with prospective collaborators and post-graduate students and post-docs regarding research opportunities that exist in the lab are welcomed.
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