Professor Adrian D. Manning

Adrian stands at the front of a room next to a projector screen, presenting to attendees about the Mulligans Flat Woodland Experiment.
Adrian kneels over a small mammal of some kind wrapped in a black blanket. He is wearing a head torch and concentrating on his work.
Adrian stands in a blue puffer jacket in the wilderness next to a tall sapling.

Experimental ecosystem ecology | Ecological long-termism | Coexistence conservation

‍Professor Adrian Manning is an experimental ecosystem ecologist at the Fenner School of Environment and Society, the Australian National University, and Principal Investigator of the Coexistence Conservation Lab. His research focuses on how functioning ecosystems can be rebuilt after species, interactions and ecological processes have been lost. Ecosystem recovery is part of the research, and research is part of ecosystem recovery.

‍His work is grounded in ecological long-termism; designing research around the timescales on which ecosystems actually recover. For more than two decades he has led the Mulligans Flat–Goorooyarroo Woodland Experiment, where four locally extinct species have been returned to the ACT and whole-ecosystem change is followed from soils and fungi through plants, populations and species interactions.

‍Adrian works directly with the institutions that shape these landscapes. He is a Trustee of the Woodlands and Wetlands Trust, sits on national recovery teams for the superb parrot, eastern quoll and Pookila, and has briefed federal and ACT ministers, the Commonwealth Threatened Species Commissioner, the NSW Chief Scientist and Engineer, and NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. Findings by Adrian and his group have changed how agencies undertake landscape and ecosystem management far beyond the Mulligans Flat – Goorooyarroo study site.

‍From this long-term experimental work emerged coexistence conservation focussed on finding ways for native species populations to rebuild, adapt and persist alongside introduced predators rather than depending indefinitely on exclusion. This concept now shapes much of the Lab’s work, from fox-impact mitigation and the reintroduction of the golden sun moth, to bush stone-curlews on Phillip Island, to a feasibility study for returning wildcats to Kielder Forest in England.

‍Adrian’s research spans restoration ecology, rewilding, translocation science, landscape ecology and conservation biology, with concepts emerging from sustained engagement with real ecological systems. He has also built the human systems around them; long-term partnerships across government, universities, NGOs and community, and a generation of researchers trained inside working ecosystem experiments.

‍His 2026 Cambridge University Press book, Rebuilding an Ecosystem, brings together twenty years of this approach.

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