Toby Gardner

As a child, my earliest career aspiration was to become a park ranger “somewhere in Africa”, protecting wildlife from poachers. Twenty-five years later this naïve ambition has matured into life-long commitment towards conservation biology. My experience to date has encompassed a diverse (and some may say bizarre) set of projects. Following my BSc at Edinburgh University (vegetation dynamics in the Brazilian cerrado), I went on to study a MSc in Applied Ecology and Conservation at the University of East Anglia (UEA), where I was involved in a thoroughly depressing meta-analysis of the demise of Caribbean coral reefs over the last 3 decades. I then spent an unforgettable year living in rural western Tanzania, studying the effectiveness of protected area networks in the Katavi ecosystem. In 2007 I finished my PhD at UEA, spending four years working as part of a large international team in the north-eastern Brazilian Amazon, attempting to understand the consequences of habitat change for tropical forest biodiversity. I am currently working at the Federal University of Lavras, Brazil. In October of this year I am starting a NERC Fellowship at the University of Cambridge and will be focussed on expanding this work to evaluate trade-offs between biodiversity and economic development in multiple-use forest landscapes across the Brazilian Amazon.

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Publications

Click here for an Endnote library of my publications

Book chapters

Cote, I. M., T. A. Gardner, J. A. Gill, D. J. Hutchinson, and A. R. Watkinson. 2006. New approaches to estimating recent ecological change on coral reefs. Pages 293-313 in I. M. Cote, and J. R. Reynolds, editors. Coral Reef Conservation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.[PDF]

Journal articles

Nichols, E., T. A. Gardner, C. A. Peres, and S. Spector. In press. Co-declining mammals and dung beetles: an impending ecological cascade. Oikos.

Ribeiro Jr, M. A., T. A. Gardner, and T. C. S. Avila-Pires. 2008. Evaluating the effectiveness of herpetofaunal sampling techniques across a habitat change gradient in a neotropical forest landscape. In press. Journal of Herpetology.

Lo-Man-Hung, N. F., T. A. Gardner, M. A. Ribeiro Jr, J. Barlow, and A. B. Bonaldo. 2008. The value of primary, secondary and plantation forests for Neotropical epigeic arachnids. In press. Journal of Arachnology.

Hawes, J., J. Barlow, T. A. Gardner, and C. Peres. 2008. The value of forest strips for understory birds in an Amazonian plantation landscape. In press. Biological Conservation.

Caro, T., T. A. Gardner, C. Stoner, E. B. Fitzherbert, and T. R. B. Davenport 2008. Assessing the effectiveness of protected areas: paradoxes call for pluralism in evaluating conservation performance. In press. Diversity and Distributions.