Having studied with an ecological focus during his Bachelors in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation Science at the University of the West of England, Arthur’s interests have since shifted towards more social stances in conservation during a highly interdisciplinary Masters in Conservation Science and Practice at Imperial College London. Here, his interests centred on a viewpoint that humans are a constituent part of the natural world, and shouldn’t be treated as something distinctly separate from it. During this time, Arthur’s research helped to improve strategic tools for community-based conservation approaches, repurposing disease-spread models to understand and forecast the spread and long-term engagement of conservation initiatives across rural South Africa.

Now as a Forrest Scholar at UWA, Arthur will seek to take lessons from his ecological training and merge them with a social focus to consider how social-ecological models of protected area resilience can be improved by integrating models of human decision-making. In the decade of ‘30×30’, a multi-national agreement to protect 30% of the world’s land and sea by 2030, Arthur’s research is very timely given the need to rapidly up-scale area-based conservation methods. Ultimately, his research aims to inform better management decisions for people and planet, together.