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.

Erika Gress

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

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.

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.