Brian strives to guide groups of people to good decisions that balance the needs of society and nature.
He applies interdisciplinary, partner-driven approaches – under the umbrella of decision analysis – to better characterize causes of conservation problems and identify effective, equitable solutions. Much of his work has focused on navigating multi-stakeholder groups to evaluate management options to recover declining and endangered species at local to range-wide scales. Common themes to his work have been thinking through important tradeoffs among objectives (e.g., ecological outcomes, cost, public support), finding optimal ways to allocate scarce resources, and capturing risk of decisions. Brian uses a variety of tools to predict consequences of decision options, including expert elicitation exercises when data are limited, habitat and population viability models developed with stakeholders, and sociological surveys.
Brian is trained as a decision scientist and quantitative ecologist and holds a PhD in Integrative Conservation and an MS in Conservation Ecology, both from the University of Georgia.