Hedley leads Wildlife Conservation Soceity’s spatial planning program and is also a research associate at the University of Queensland. Hedley’s main focus is on supporting biodiversity conservation and sustainable development planning at the landscape and seascape scale. He is a specialist on designing and integrating multidisciplinary science and priority setting analysis to support planning and decision-making process. He also works on development planning including how to improve siting of impacts, and better application of the mitigation hierarchy including the design of biodiversity offsets.

His experience includes working alongside NGO's, governments, development banks, communities and with the private sector. He earned his PhD from the University of Queensland where he developed conservation planning approaches accounting for ecosystem dynamics, adaptive management, and uncertainty. He has worked in academia and as a consultant but much of his career has been working with NGOs.

He undertook a post-doc with The Nature Conservancy (and UQ), and then worked for Conservation International before joining Wildlife Conservation Society. He has conducted applied research and on-the-ground projects in marine, terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems in Asia-Pacifc, Africa, South America, Mediterranean Europe and Antarctica, and published over 40 peer reviewed publications.