Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation
Availability:
Available for supervision
Paul Dennis leads an exciting research group that applies cutting-edge technologies to understand the roles of microorganisms and their responses to environmental change.
He is also a passionate educator and public speaker who advocates for the importance of biological diversity and evidence-based environmental awareness. He has talked about his research on ABC Radio and a range of other media outlets.
His teaching covers aspects of ecology, microbiology, plant and soil science, and climatology. He considers these topics to be of fundamental importance for the development of more sustainable societies and takes pride in helping others to obtain the knowledge and skills they need to build a better future.
Paul's research has taken him to Antarctica, the Amazon Rainforest, high mountains and oceans. The approaches used in his lab draw on a wide range of expertise in molecular biology, ecology, statistics, computer science, advanced imaging and soil science. He applies these skills to a wide-range of topics and systems including plant-microbe interactions, Antarctic marine and terrestrial ecology, biogeography, pollution and human health.
I am an entomologist with a research interest focused on studying host-pathogen interactions and discovering insect-specific viruses. I have investigated gene expression and the role of small non-coding RNAs in various host-pathogen models, particularly in crucial agricultural pests and medically significant vectors like the Aedes aegypti, responsible for transmitting dengue and Zika viruses. My previous project, aimed at exploring the function of Oryctes rhinoceros nudivirus in the biological control of the coconut rhinoceros beetle in the Pacific Islands, has substantially enhanced our comprehension of this invasive pest within the framework of an offshore biosecurity strategy. By establishing industry partnerships and securing funding to improve the Australian sugar industry, one of Australia's largest agricultural sectors, I have been able to focus on entomopathogenic viruses that affect root-feeding pests in sugarcane.
Dr Loren Fardell is a nationally and internationally acknowledged community wildlife ecologist that uses ethology, habitat assessment, environmental genomics, evolutionary and plasticity dynamics, and conservation biology and physiology practices to understand the dynamics of ecosystems in disturbed environments. Her research focuses on multidimensional human activity and predator to prey relationships, to understand pressures and responses in disturbed environments. She uses progressive and minimally invasive methods to observe human activities, the associated introduced and novel species, habitat structure, and community ecology in relation to the functional behaviour and fear and stress responses of extant wildlife. Dr Fardell’s novel and diverse perspective bridges the gap between scientific disciplines to achieve an understanding of how wildlife conservation may be best achieved and supported to self-sustain. Her understanding of how individual animals respond to pressures and how this may shape their population and in turn the ecosystem, and how the structure of a disturbed habitat may affect such responses, has allowed her to advise on and direct wildlife conservation in disturbed habitats.
Valerie’s research focusses on coastal ecosystem conservation and restoration. She holds an AXA-UNESCO research fellowship on mangrove community forestry for resilient coastal livelihoods, endorsed as an action of the UN Ocean Decade. She co-leads a National Environmental Science Program (NESP) project on carbon abatement and biodiversity enhancements from controlling feral ungulates in wetlands in Australia and is developing a framework to measure verified biodiversity benefits in coastal wetland restoration projects in partnership with CSIRO. She recently led a NESP project on coastal wetland restoration opportunities in Australia for blue carbon and co-benefits for biodiversity, fisheries, water quality, and coastal protection and an Australian Research Council linkage project to identify social and ecological conditions that enable effective mangrove conservation over global and regional scales with partners at The Nature Conservancy and Healthy Land and Water. She has published research on the drivers of global mangrove losses and gains and coastal wetland restoration opportunities. She has co-authored international guidelines on mangrove restoration with Conservation International and incorporation of coastal wetlands into national greenhouse gas inventories with the Australian Government International Blue Carbon Partnerships. Valerie is an experienced ecologist and is a board member of the Society of Ecological Restoration Australasia and a representative of Australia’s Restoration Decade Alliance.
Dr. Anthony Halog: A Pioneer in Sustainable Systems and Circular Economy
Dr. Anthony Halog is a leading authority in sustainable systems engineering and circular economy, with over 22 years of post-PhD experience in academia and research. His work focuses on integrating life cycle assessment (LCA), systems thinking, and industrial ecology to advance global sustainability efforts. Dr. Halog has successfully led numerous research projects in industrial ecology and sustainable supply chain management, contributing significantly to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs) and Planetary Boundaries frameworks.
His prolific career includes over 125 publications that have been widely cited and referenced in policy documents by international bodies such as the United Nations and the European Union. With a strong commitment to mentoring, Dr. Halog has guided numerous PhD candidates and postdoctoral researchers, fostering the next generation of sustainability experts. Since completing his PhD, he has examined numerous theses from various universities in Australia, North America, Africa, and Asia. His experience also extends to reviewing several grant proposals for prestigious funding bodies, including the National Science Foundation in the USA and European funding schemes.
Dr. Anthony Halog has received numerous fellowships and awards throughout his career. Notably, he was awarded fellowships from prestigious institutions such as the OECD, DAAD, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). He has held visiting fellowships across the globe, including in the UK, Germany, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, focusing on areas like Circular Economy, Green Hydrogen Policy, and Life Cycle Assessment. Dr. Halog's accolades also include early career fellowships from NSERC (Canada) and JSPS, along with several international research grants and academic scholarships, reflecting his global recognition in sustainability science and engineering.
Key areas of expertise include circular economy, bioeconomy, LCA, sustainable supply chain management, and the application of operations research and optimization in engineering sustainable systems. Dr. Halog’s interdisciplinary approach and international collaborations have positioned him as a thought leader in transitioning to a low-carbon, circular economy.
Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology
Availability:
Available for supervision
Dr. Amrita Kambo is a multi-disciplinary researcher at The University of Queensland. Her work borrows and applies theoretical constructs from concepts such as ‘social acceptance’ and ‘social licence to operate’ (SLO). These modules can be applied to assess the extent to which a business, or industry or technology gains tacit support from the wider public. Additionally, the SLO concept can be applied to understand standards of responsible behaviour, transparency and accountability in a wide range of settings. To date, Amrita has applied the SLO concept to understand community expectations in the context of renewable energy technologies such as hydrogen and biogas under a project funded by the Future Fuels CRC using familiar methods in social sciences such as surveys, interviews, focus groups and participatory research.
Amrita's wider research interests include sustainable cities, urban infrastructure, planning and place-making. These interests are rooted in the Amrita’s early career and experience in architecture and design.
Amrita’s PhD research included a review of influential topics in context of ‘sustainable’ architecture - ‘regenerative’ design and development, biophilic design, ecosystem services, ‘Geodesign’, biomimicry, green infrastructure, positive development, net-zero design and so on.
Sreekar’s research focuses on using ecological theory to inform conservation decision making. He is interested in a broad range of topics, including spatial conservation planning, evidence-based conservation policy, community assembly rules, extinction synergies, and land-use management. A big question that drives his research is how to address the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. His current research is centred around studying the environmental risks associated with mining and mineral processing.
He serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Applied Ecology and has spent the past 15 years at universities across Australia, China, Czechia, India and Singapore. Sreekar is an avid birder and enjoys this aspect of his work both professionally and recreationally.
April Reside is a lecturer in the School of the Environment and School of Agriculture and Food Sustainability, affiliated with the Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science.
Dr Reside's research encompasses ecology, conservation, and policy; investigating refuges and refugia; and recovery actions and their costs for Australia’s threatened species. April also works on conservation of woodland bird communities, the impact of climate change on biodiversity, and strategies for climate change adaptation. This work has involved applying conservation planning frameworks to identify spatial priorities for climate change adaptation for biodiversity and carbon sequestration.
April has a particular fascination of flying vertebrates, and has worked on bats on three continents and nine countries. She worked as a field ecologist for non-government organisations before her PhD on understanding potential impacts of climate change on Australian tropical savanna birds. She adapted species distribution modelling techniques to account for temporal and spatial variability in the distributions of highly vagile bird species. These dynamic species distribution models take into account species’ responses to fluctuations in weather and short-term climatic conditions rather than long-term climate averages. In her first postdoctoral position, Dr Reside modelled the distribution of c.1700 vertebrates across Australia at a fine resolution, and located the future location of suitable climate for all these species for each decade until 2085. From this, she identified hotspots across Australia where species were moving to in order to track their suitable climate, informing the IUCN SSC Guidelines for Assessing Species’ Vulnerability to Climate Change by the IUCN Species Survival Commission.
April has been involved in conservation of the Black-throated Finch for over 12 years, and is Chair of the Black-throated Finch Recovery Team. She has served on Birdlife Australia's Research and Conservation Committee and Threatened Species Committee; and the Science Committee for the Invasive Species Council.
Professor Anthony J. Richardson uses mathematical, statistical, computational and spatial planning tools to investigate human impacts on our oceans - and to find solutions. Particular foci include:
Marine spatial planning - Where best to locate marine protected areas to minimise impacts on people, maximise ecosystem benefits, ensure they are climate-smart and connected, and enable multiple-use zoning of the ocean.
Developing models of marine ecosystems - How do lower trophic levels (plankton) regulate fisheries productivity and carbon sequestration, and how will these be impacted by climate change.
Long-term change in lower trophic levels (plankton) in the ocean. This includes both field work around Australia and global analyses.
Anthony did an undergradulate degree in Mathematics and Biology at the University of Queensland, followed by an Honours degree there. He was awarded a PhD degree from the University of Cape Town in 1998, modelling the dynamics of marine ecosystems. Since 2005, Anthony has held a joint position between UQ (School of the Environment) and CSIRO Environment. He has previously held positions at the University of Cape Town (South Africa), the University of the Western Cape (South Africa), and the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation of Ocean Science (UK).
Anthony runs a dynamic lab at the nexus between conservation science and mathematics. His focus is on using mathematical tools to better conserve biodiversity, predict impacts of climate change, and understand the functioning of marine ecosystems. If you have a background in marine ecology and are interested in applying mathematics/statistics/computational science and want to apply your skills to real-world problems, get in touch.
My research group uses genetic markers as tools for understanding dispersal and gene flow, often with conservation implications and most frequently focusing on highly dispersive marine animals such as fishes, mussels, and corals. We also study how gene flow and natural selection affect genomic variation and limit gene exchange across genomes, populations, and species.
Research interest: Monitoring ecosystem health of coral reefs and seagrass habitats, integrating field and remote sensing image datasets, and the developing applied cost-effective mapping and monitoring approaches. Developed approaches have been adopted as standard practice globally, making a difference in conservation of these valuable habitats. The long term monitoring studies at Heron and Moreton Bay formed the basis for the development of mapping and monitoring over time and space at local to global scale.
Current projects:
1) Long term monitoring of benthic composition at Heron Reef (2002-ongoing). Annual photoquadrate surveys are being collected at Heron Reef, Southern Great Barrier Reef. Initiated to develop remote sensing mapping approaches and assess coral composition over time. The resulting Maps, photo quadrate and benthic data, spectral reflectance are accessible online.
2) Long term monitoring of seagrass composition and abundance in Moreton bay Marine Park (2000-ongoing). For Eastern Banks it included monitoring seagrass species, cover and biomass 15x times since 2004 using photoquadrate survey and satelite imagery and for Moreton Bay it included seagrass extent and cover (2004, 2009, 2015, 2021, 2022), all data accessible via Moreton Bay Research Station.
3) Smart Sat CRC Hyperspectral Remote Sensing of Seagrass and Coral Reefs 2023-2027. Collaborative effort with CSIRO, Adelaide University, DES Adelaide Coastal Waters.
4) 3D GBR Habitat Mapping Project 2015 - ongoing: Mapping and monitoring geomorphic zonation, bottom type and predicted coral type habitat for every Great Barrier Reef within the Marine Park.
5) Global habitat mapping project 2019-2023 Developed and implemention of global habitat mapping as part of the Allen Coral Atlas resulting in extent, geomorphic and benthic maps for reefs globally, funded through with Vulcan Philanthropies in partnership with; Planet; the Arizona State University and the National Geographic Society.
Other projects: Advisor for Reef Cloud Australian Institute of Marine Science and Coordinated Global Research Assessment of Seagrass System (C-GRASS).
Current position: Associate Professior in Marine Remote Sensing. Academic Director Heron Island Research Station and affiliated researchers with Centre for Marine Science and Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science
Citizen science: Strong supporter of citizen science based projects, as trainer, organiser and advisor for Reef Check Australia, CoralWatch, Great Reef Census and UniDive.
RESEARCH INTERESTS Fire Ecology, Ecological Genomics, Wildlife Ecology, Conservation Biology, Invasive Plants
My research group studies fire ecology and conservation biology. Currently, we are working on:
Managing interactions between changing fire regimes and invasive plants
Influence of changing fire regimes on plant-animal interactions
Restoration of native grassland
Biodiversity in agricultural landscapes
Platypus distribution & conservation
We have a special interest in plants and animals living in fire-prone areas because of the fascinating fact that these ecosystems are never static but continually re-shaped by cycles of fire and regeneration. While being grounded in fundamental biology and ecological theory, our research is always aimed at improving knowledge for biodiversity conservation. Our work has applications in fire management, biological invasion and threatened species conservation.
TECHNICAL APPROACHES: POPULATION GENETICS | SPATIAL LANDSCAPE GENETICS | DEMOGRAPHIC SIMULATION MODELLING | STATISTICAL MODELLING OF POPULATIONS & COMMUNITIES | BIOINFORMATICS | SPATIAL ANALYSIS IN R | We also know how to drop a hand-made 1 x 1 m polypipe quadrat on the ground and do good old-fashioned field work.
TEACHING: I teach ecology and wildlife science. At UQ I have coordinated and taught AGRC1032 Elements of Ecology and ANIM3018 Wildlife Technology for four years, among other teaching duties.
EDITORIAL I am Associate Editor for Wildlife Letters (2023–)
I was Associate Editor for Journal of Applied Ecology for four years (2018–2022).
CURRICULUM VITAE
2019 – current Lecturer, University of Queensland
2018 – 2022 Associate Editor, Journal of Applied Ecology
2018 – 2019 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow, Trinity College Dublin
2016 – 2017 Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Trinity College Dublin
2015 – 2016 Post-doctoral Research Assistant, University of Melbourne
I'm a quantitative community ecologist with broad experience across terrestrial and marine systems, modern and geological time, local and global scales with both theoretical and practical focus. I'm driven by discovery, interested in myriad topics on how communities form and function, but particularly how we measure and make comparisons between communities.
Translating anomaly detection to ecology: In a world experiencing climate change, biodiversity loss and other human impacts, detecting anomalous ecological systems accurately and early potentially offers vast benefits to conservation and ecosystem management. Anomaly detection is a fast-moving area of research applied in fields as varied as banking fraud detection, cybersecurity and cancer diagnosis. These fields deal with data as complex and incomplete as ecology, but we haven't plumbed this expertise for benefits to ecology. This is the primary focus of my DECRA.
Grounding ecological novelty for practical use: Ecologists have been talking about novel systems for twenty years, and related topics (such as "no-analog systems") for even longer. Despite well-cited work on how "novel" can be a useful label for ecological restoration, there's a mismatch between management frameworks, which often use ad-hoc qualitative criteria, and quantitative novelty research, which has been mostly performed at global scales. Understanding how to measure novelty, how analytic choices affect measurements, and how to downscale our inferences to be practicable, has been a focus for me and my colleagues.
The linguistic evolution of programming languages: The use of scientific programming languages like R, Python and Julia are becoming not only popular, but mandatory skills for researchers. The utility of these languages has been improved by new versions and a plethora of community-created addon packages. This approximates features of natural language evolution, where lexicon changes over time. Understanding the speed and direction of how programming languages evolve can give us a unique insight into how humans learn and alter languages, and how we might ensure they remain understandable into the future. I am currently using GitHub as a vast repository of time-stamped programming “texts”, ripe for linguistic analysis.
Community ecology through the lens of functional traits: It doesn’t matter who you are, it matters what you do. That applies to organisms too. Despite decades of research into how physiology and life history strategy, often proxied through easy-to-measure “functional traits”, functional ecology is still more niche than it should be. Currently my colleagues and I are exploring how a functional lens alters ecological novelty, but I am always thinking about ecology in the light of how organisms live.
