UC Berkeley

While human impacts on ecosystems rapidly accelerate, our techniques for observing those impacts are quickly outpacing our capacity to respond strategically to their drivers. Sitting at the intersection of environmental, data, and decision science, my dissertation explores how we translate the ever-expanding amount of ecological information into effective and equitable strategies for managing landscapes and seascapes. Introduced briefly in Chapter 1, my research leverages computational tools and interdisciplinary approaches first to understand decision-making patterns in social-environmental systems (Chapters 2 and 3). In the following two chapters, I focus on leveraging this understanding to devise robust strategies to meet biodiversity and climate policy targets under uncertainty (Chapters 4 and 5). In the final two chapters, I highlight why, as we pave a path for the next era of conservation science marked by increasingly advanced decision-making technology, we must urgently ask the question: whose values shape the data (Chapter 6) and algorithms (Chapter 7) that will decide the future of our planet?