Thriving Oceans Research Hub

A large focal point of our research examines the role of socioeconomic factors in the collective management of common pool resources. We examine a broad range of governance arrangements, including customary management, co-management, marine protected areas, and international governance.

Research on this work includes our paper published in Science and work on compliance published in Nature Sustainability.

We examine how societies and ecosystems respond to environmental change. This research is highly interdisciplinary and links social, ecological and environmental systems. The theoretical foundation for this work is largely grounded in resilience and vulnerability.

In the face of major climate-induced threats to coastal systems, such as the recent global coral bleaching events in 2016 and 2017, we investigate how coastal communities can build their adaptive capacity to deal with these changes in the future.

In our 2018 paper published in Nature Climate Change, we propose an approach to build adaptive capacity to climate change across five key domains:

1. The assets that people can draw upon in times of need
2. The flexibility to change strategies
3. The ability to organise and act collectively
4. Learning to recognise and respond to change
5. The agency to determine whether to change or not

Societies and ecosystems are linked in complicated ways. My group uses rigorous social science and ecological theory to explore dynamics, thresholds, and feedback between social and ecological systems.

We use large-scale field data to examine the specific conditions under which different human-environment interaction models (e.g., Malthusian, ecological modernisation, political economy) best explain ecosystem conditions at different scales.

The current centerpiece of this research theme is a global positive deviance analysis. This project will adapt the exceptional responders framework used in medical research to locate the most resilient reefs, investigate what makes them especially resilient, and use these as models to increase resilience in other locations.

This project builds directly off of my 2016 “Bright Spots” Nature paper which identified reefs with more fish than expected, given the socioeconomic and environmental conditions they are exposed to and identified enabling features.

Our follow-up paper in PNAS examined a bright spot over time, paving the way for a more dynamic exceptional responder analysis.

Christina Buelow

Christina is a quantitative ecologist who loves data and models. She got her start as a field ecologist, but these days she spends most of her time behind a computer developing models and tools to solve challenging problems related to conservation and sustainable use of Earth's ecosystems. Recently, she has been working closely with international NGOs to inform climate-smart conservation of coastal ecosystems. Find out more here: https://cabuelow.github.io/personal-website/

Starting date: November 2024.

Matthew C. Clark

Matthew earned his PhD from Boise State University's Human-Environment Systems center. During that time, he was also a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, department of Human Behaviour, Ecology & Culture. Matthew's work spans conservation, ecology, evolutionary anthropology, and environmental economics, all falling under social-ecological systems science. He uses various generative models to hypothesize about social-ecological processes and test those hypotheses with data. Matthew is currently a postdoc at Imperial College London studying why communities of all sizes adopt or abandon natural resource management practices. For example, he works closely with Conservational International to understand how expected changes in the reliability weather patterns may affect pastoralism and the sustainability of rangelands across South Africa and Botswana.

Starting date: September 2025.

Erika Gress (Research assistant)

For eight years, Erika has studied the taxonomy, phylogeny, and ecology of Antipatharia (Black Corals). Her work is vital for understanding species diversity and geographic and bathymetric ranges.

Justin Grima (Research assistant)

A Data Scientist on Professor Cinner’s coral reef sustainability project. Justin's work is focused on assessing global coral reef fisheries sustainability and developing decision-support tools.

Emily Lester

Emily is a marine ecologist with a broad interest in coral reef ecology. The unifying theme of her research is understanding how ecological processes, such as predator-prey interactions, unfold under the footprint of human activity, such as fishing, at a range of spatial scales from local to global. She is particularly interested in using a combination of direct and remote sampling with gradients in predator abundance created by human exploitation to examine how the loss of predators impacts the function and resilience of coral reefs.

Starting date: August 2024.

Bing Lin

Bing is a conservation scientist whose research lies at the nexus of applied behavioural science, conservation ecology, data analytics, and environmental policy. An ecologist by training, Bing’s research centers around tropical coral reef ecosystems and uses interdisciplinary methods to inform effective, efficient, enduring, and equitable policies and interventions. Outside of research, Bing loves conservation photography, science communication, and many forms of Type 2 fun in the outdoors. Prior to joining the Thriving Oceans Research Hub, Bing was wrapping up his PhD entitled “Nature vs. Human Nature: The socio-ecological dimensions of coral reef conservation across scales” at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.

Starting date: November 2024.

Amelia Meier

Amelia is a quantitative conservation ecologist whose research aims to inform applied conservation management in both marine and terrestrial systems. Her work focuses particularly on understanding how wildlife interacts with humans and the environment. Using cutting-edge statistical and remote sensing techniques, Amelia leverages big, often messy datasets to answer complex ecological questions and scale up to broader landscape or global patterns. By uncovering the underlying processes driving ecosystem dynamics, she develops innovative methods for measuring ecosystem health, ultimately contributing to more effective conservation strategies.

Starting date: August 2024.

Bess Ruff

Bess is a marine social scientist with broad interests in human-ocean interactions and the development of management and policy mechanisms that support coexisting objectives of healthy oceans, economic security, and social equity. With a background in economics, conservation planning, marine resources management, and geography, Bess employs both qualitative and quantitative methods, most recently to assess the socioeconomic drivers of marine aquaculture development around the world. Prior to joining the Thriving Oceans Research Hub, Bess was a postdoctoral researcher at Florida State University, in conjunction with the National Sea Grant Law Center at the University of Mississippi, where she investigated policy mechanisms that can facilitate sustainable marine aquaculture development, both in the U.S. and globally.

Starting date: October 2024.

Helen Yan

Helen is a quantitative ecologist and a Bayesian enthusiast with a focus on marine fishes. Previously, she worked as a researcher for the IUCN Shark Specialist Group, which assessed the conservation status of more than one thousand of the world’s sharks, rays, and chimaeras. She has since shifted from cartilaginous to bony fishes, where her current research aims to understand and quantify the underlying energetic fluxes of marine ecosystems across human-dominated landscapes. Helen is currently completing a PhD from James Cook University, where she is disentangling the ecological and socioeconomic drivers of fish biomass production across space and time. She is the co-founder of a statistical resource blog and has provided numerous coding and analytical workshops to other ecologists (see more here: https://bayesbaes.github.io).

Starting date: January 2025.

Melissa Hampton-Smith

Melissa's PhD in is environmental social science at James Cook University and her research focuses on fairness in marine conservation, especially how issues of governance and participatory processes can impact environmental management. 

Yi Wang

Yi is visiting PhD student from China who is working to construct a spatiotemporal gravity model of human activities affecting coral reefs. Yi is integrating time series data on human population, road network, and land cover to generate a multi-decadal gravity data layer.

Tomas Molfino

Tomas has a strong background in economy, and has been providing professional support to the University of Sydney for the past 5 years. His journey at th University started back in 2019 by designing and developing a Science Mentoring Program, which has been awarded 2 consecutive Student Life grants. Tomas has then moved to the School of Physics, where he first worked in Education Support and later in Research Administration. He has joined the project to provide operational, administrative, finance, logistic and data management support.