Alec Christie

Biography

Fellowship: My fellowship project has three stands: 1. Finding ways to directly combine and assess different forms of evidence (e.g., the scientific literature and indigenous and local community knowledge) into evidence-based decision-making; 2. Developing new approaches to assessing the reliability and relevance of evidence to different decision-making contexts; 3. Quantifying the generalisability of evidence for different conservation actions to understand whether the findings of evidence transfer well between different contexts. I want to ensure that in the future, evidence-based decision-making combines diverse sources of knowledge for decision-making, whilst making sure to assess the reliability and relevance of each piece of evidence so we can provide tailored recommendations to decision-makers based on their local context.

Previous work: My PhD research focused on applying evidence-based principles from medicine to biodiversity conservation via the Conservation Evidence project. In particular, my work involved quantifying the gaps and biases in the evidence base for conservation, as well as co-developing decision support tools with conservationists to make the reasoning and evidence behind their decision-making more transparent. In my postdoc with the Conservation Evidence project, I worked on the BioRISC project to design and improve an interface to an online application that enables users to obtain customised syntheses of evidence on invasive species management interventions that are dynamically updated (www.metadataset.com).