ProfessorJoshua Cinner

My main interest is in using a bright spots (positive deviance) approach to illuminate the conditions that enable ecosystems resilience in a human-dominated world. I pioneered the concept of coral reef “bright spots” (reefs that outperform expectations under intense human pressure). By systematically identifying outliers through a Bayesian hierarchical model applied to a global ecological datasets, my bright spots work revealed how resilience may arise from ecological, environmental, and social enabling conditions. Additionally, my development of the human gravity metric has enabled global-scale analyses of how ecological outcomes vary along gradients of human impact. This work has uncovered nonlinear relationships between human pressure and ecological outcomes, showing that the ability of protected areas to sustain ecological functions depends on their placement along a gradient of human impacts. For example, my research has demonstrated that different ecological goals (e.g., sustaining fish biomass or the presence of top predators) are optimized under distinct levels of human pressure, and that achieving multiple goals simultaneously is only possible under limited contextual scenarios. These insights have helped illuminate the ecological trade-offs and threshold dynamics that shape resilience in human-dominated ecosystems.

Professor Cinner's research aligns with the Faculty of Science Research Strengths - Understanding Life on Earth, Complex Systems, Biodiversity Conservation, Sustainability, Healthy Ecosystems, Climate and Environmental Change, Food Security, Decision-Making for a Sustainable Future.