Area of Expertise:
Tara Martin is a Professor in Conservation Decision Science with the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences, Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia. She is a pioneer in the field of Conservation Decision Science – combining predictive ecological models with decision science to inform what actions to take, where to take them and when to achieve our conservation and natural resource management goals. Through the Martin Conservation Decisions Lab at UBC, Tara leads a team of graduate students and research fellows seeking to understand, predict and ultimately inform decisions about the impact of global change on biodiversity and natural resources. Tara was recently awarded The Nature Conservancy Professor in Practice Award,Thomson Reuters Citation & Innovation Awardfor her work in Climate change decision making and a Wilburforce Conservation Fellowship. Tara is a member of the IUCN Climate Change Specialist Group and co-leads the Climate Adaptation Theme.
Tara leads the Fraser River Estuary Resilience project with Dr Laura Kehoe and Dr Julia Baum. This project will identify the management actions required to abate the key threats to the Fraser River Estuary (FRE) in order to ensure its long-term resilience. Research effort to date in the FRE has focused on identifying its natural assets and their threats. This project will develop techniques in conservation decision science to identify the most effective and at the same time, least costly management actions needed to ensure the long-term resilience of the FRE. This project will be carried out in close collaboration with many key stakeholders and organizations including the Pacific Salmon Foundation (PSF), Raincoast Conservation Foundation, Environment Canada, and Fisheries and Oceans Canada.This project is funded by MEOPAR (http://meopar.ca, the Marine Environmental Observation Prediction and Response Network).
Select Presentation(s) / Publication(s):
Kehoe, Laura; Lund, Jessie; Baum, Julia; Chalifour, Lia; and Martin, Tara, “Prioritizing management actions for the Fraser River estuary” (2018). Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference. 503.
https://cedar.wwu.edu/ssec/2018ssec/allsessions/503
Martin, T. G., Kehoe*, C. Mantyka-Pringle, I. Chades, S. Wilson, R. Bloom, S. Davis, R. Fisher, J. Keith, K. Mehl, B. Prieto Diaz, M. Wayland, T. Wellicome, K. Zimmer, and P. A. Smith. 2018. Prioritizing recovery funding to maximize conservation of endangered species. Conservation Letters. PDF
Schuster, R., Law, E.A., Rodewalde, A.D., Martin, T.G., Wilson, K.A., Watts, M., Possingham, H.P., Arcese, P. 2018. Tax-shifting and incentives for biodiversity conservation on private lands. Conservation LettersOnLine early PDF.
Watts, M.E., Stewart, R.R., Martin, T.G., Klein, C.J., Carwardine, J. & Possingham, H.P. 2017. Systematic Conservation Planning with Marxan. In: Learning Landscape Ecology: A Practical Guide to Concepts and Techniques (eds. Gergel, SE & Turner, MG). Springer New York New York, NY, pp. 211-227.
Young, B.E., T.G Martin, J.E.M. Watson, W.B. Foden, S. Williams and B.R. Scheffers. 2016. Setting climate change vulnerability assessment goals and objectives. In W.B. Foden and B.E. Young, editors. IUCN SSC Guidelines for Assessing Species’ Vulnerability to Climate Change. Version 1.0. Occasional Paper of the IUCN Species Survival Commission. No. 59. Gland, Switzerland and Cambridge,UK. pp 33-48. PDF
Mantyka-Pringle, C.S**., Martin, T.G., Moffatt, D.B., Linke, S., Rhodes, J.R. (2014) Understanding and predicting the combined effects of climate change and land-use change on freshwater macroinvertebrates and fish. Journal of Applied Ecology51:572-581 PDF
