Dr Ayesha Tulloch

Biography

Dr Ayesha Tulloch is a conservation decision scientist with a background in ecology and a passion for building knowledge and tools to address the world’s most pressing challenges of recovering biodiversity whilst maintaining human well-being in human-modified landscapes. It is important to Ayesha that her research is applicable and accessible to the people and organisations that make conservation decisions, and she takes a transdisciplinary approach to her research, drawing on a range of field and analytical skills, collaborations and professional experience to address real questions that address the global biodiversity crisis we are currently facing.

To learn more about Ayesha, see her personal website, and to read her publications, please check out Google Scholar.

Research

Instead of being renowned for its unique wildlife, Australia is becoming known for its terrible conservation record. Hundreds of species and ecosystems are declining or already lost because of human activities. Because budgets to do conservation are limited, we need help choosing how, when and where to conduct management actions that can recover native ecosystems and species before they are lost. Ayesha's research tackles this challenge by building tools for allocating effort to biodiversity management, and designing ways to monitor ecosystem change so that we know whether conservation efforts are working. She has worked on many conservation problems, from the field to the lab to the computer, including recovering native mammals from the impacts of introduced cats and foxes, working with farmers and non-government conservation organisations to restore degraded land, and recovering ecosystems from the Australian megafires of 2019/2020.

Ayesha is building a team of researchers at QUT interested in developing resilient agri-food supply chain interventions that can benefit both biodiversity and people. Despite many efforts to monitor and manage declining species and ecosystems around the world, biodiversity is still not routinely included in mainstream decision-making and continues to decline at the highest rate in human history. Added to this is the problem that both natural and agri-food systems are changing all the time, with climate change likely to increase the impacts of extreme events like drought, fire and economic shocks. Ayesha's goal is to build approaches and tools that can help predict the effectiveness of different kinds of interventions in agri-food systems (e.g. farm sustainability initiatives, consumer marketing to change purchasing behaviours, taxes on “unsustainable” foods), and learn how we can best manage dynamic production and consumption systems to have the best outcomes for people and for nature. Please contact her if you are interested in working with her on this.

Ayesha is a strong supporter of diversity and inclusion and believes that everyone has their own unique path to follow and should be helped through that journey, wherever it takes them. She is a proud member of the LGBTQIA+ community and chairs the Queensland Chapter of Queers in Science, a national initiative to support LGBTQIA+ people in STEMM.