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Global Institute for Water Security

Research Area(s)

  • Conservation planning
  • Biodiversity
  • Land-use change
  • Climate change
  • Environmental decision-making, prioritization
  • Water management

Chrystal Mantyka-Pringle is an Applied Ecologist and Conservation Planner who specializes on understanding the impacts and interactions of climate change and land-use change on biodiversity and translating the implications of global change into conservation planning. Chrystal achieved a Bachelor of Science with Honours in Marine Biology from James Cook University in Australia. Later she received a PhD in Applied Ecology from the University of Queensland in Australia on the topic of decision making for conserving biodiversity in the face of climate change and land-use change. Chrystal has worked for the Australian Government Department of Environment and Resource Management and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) as a Research Projects Officer focused on maintaining and managing water quality and aquatic ecosystem health and minimizing the risk of infestation of invasive species. Chrystal has now joined the U of S and the Global Institute for Water Security in 2014 as a post-doctoral research fellow to develop a decision theory model for examining environmental change in the Canadian River deltas.    

Chrystal’s research interests include:

  • Understanding the interactions between multiple stressors on patterns and processes shaping biodiversity and ecosystem services
  • Identifying spatial priorities for conservation actions, particularly restoration ecology at local, regional and global scales
  • Using expert knowledge and empirical data to make good and adaptive conservation planning decisions
  • Investigating the role of collaboration in conservation, particularly the links between scientists, practitioners,  managers, policy makers and the public in achieving defensible science-based conservation and environment decisions  

Chrystal is an associate member of the Conservation Decisions Team with the CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences in Brisbane, Australia (http://conservationdecisions.org/). She is also a research affiliate with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions (http://ceed.edu.au/) and the National Environment Research Program’s Research Hub for Environmental Decisions. These are multi-disciplinary groups with expertise in ecology, systematic conservation planning, priority threat management, artificial intelligence, and decision theory.

Research Keywords: Conservation planning, Biodiversity, Land-use change, Climate change, Environmental decision-making, Prioritization, Water management

Recent Publications:

  • Mantyka-Pringle C, Westman CN, Kythreotis AP, & Schindler DW (2015) Honouring Indigenous Treaty Rights for Climate Justice. Nature Climate Change 5:798-801.          
  • Mantyka-Pringle C, Visconti P, Marco MD, Martin T, Rondinini C & Rhodes JR (2015) Climate Change Modifies Risk of Global Biodiversity Loss due to Land-Cover Change. Biological Conservation 187:103-111.
  • Mantyka-Pringle C, Kythreotis AP (2014) Climate policy: Translating public action into policy. Nature 514(7524): 567-567.
  • Mantyka-Pringle C, Martin TG, Moffatt DB, Linke S & Rhodes JR (2014) Understanding and Predicting the Combined Effects of Climate Change and Land-Use Change on Freshwater Macroinvertebrates and Fish. Journal of Applied Ecology 51(3): 572-581.       
  • Mantyka-Pringle C, Rhodes JR (2014) Riparian restoration mitigates the impacts of climate change. Wetlands Australia 25: 75-75.     
  • Guisan A, Naujokaitis-Lewis I, Mantyka-Pringle C, Possingham HP & Buckley YM et al. (2013) Predicting species distributions for conservation decisions. Ecology Letters 16(12): 1424-1435.     
  • Mantyka-Pringle C, Martin TG & Rhodes JR (2013) Erratum: Interactions between climate and habitat loss effects on biodiversity: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Global Change Biology 19(5): 1642-1644.          
  • Mantyka-Pringle C, Martin TG & Rhodes JR (2012) Interactions between climate and habitat loss effects on biodiversity: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Global Change Biology 18(4): 1239-1252.
  • Mantyka C & Bellwood DR (2007) Direct evaluation of macroalgal removal by herbivorous coral reef fishes. Coral Reefs 26(2): 435-442.
  • Mantyka C & Bellwood DR (2007) Macroalgal selectivity among an herbivorous reef fish assemblage. Marine Ecology Progress Series 352:177-185.