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Lorna Hernandez Santin is a restoration ecologist whose research focuses on understanding, monitoring, and improving ecosystem recovery and biodiversity outcomes following disturbance. Her work integrates restoration ecology, fauna ecology, conservation biology, environmental monitoring, remote sensing, and spatial analysis to support evidence-based restoration and nature-positive outcomes.

As Acting Group Leader of the Ecosystem & Biodiversity Group within the Centre for Environmental Responsibility in Mining, Lorna contributes to research that assesses mining impacts on flora and fauna, develops approaches to restore ecosystem services, supports recolonisation by native species, and improves the long-term sustainability of disturbed landscapes. See the group’s website for more information: [smi.uq.edu.au].

Lorna collaborates with industry, government, and research partners to improve how restoration success is defined, measured, and achieved. Her research supports the application of the mitigation hierarchy and adaptive management, helping organisations avoid and minimise impacts, implement effective restoration strategies, and evaluate ecological recovery using robust monitoring approaches. This work aims to improve biodiversity outcomes throughout the mine life cycle, from project planning and impact mitigation to rehabilitation, mine closure, and post-closure recovery. Her research also explores the use of emerging technologies, including drone- and satellite-based remote sensing, hyperspectral imaging, and automated species detection, to improve environmental monitoring and restoration assessment.

Current research interests include:

• Mine rehabilitation and ecological restoration
• Fauna ecology and biodiversity conservation
• Restoration assessment and ecosystem recovery trajectories
• Restoration frameworks, standards, targets, and completion criteria
• Ecological indicators and monitoring frameworks
• Environmental monitoring using field-based methods and remote sensing technologies, including imagery collected from drones, aircraft, and satellites using RGB, multispectral, and hyperspectral sensors
• Species detection, habitat assessment, and spatial modelling using remote sensing approaches
• Landscape ecology and spatial analysis
• Evidence-based approaches to mine closure and environmental management

Her broader research experience includes wildlife ecology, conservation biology, habitat suitability modelling, species distributions, movement ecology, and biodiversity monitoring across Australia and the Americas.

I am an aquatic ecologist and catchment scientist whose work focuses on understanding how environmental change, land use, and pollutants influence freshwater ecosystem health. My research spans aquatic ecology, ecotoxicology, water quality, large-scale environmental monitoring, and data analytics, with a particular interest in the effects of pesticides and pesticide mixtures on aquatic ecosystems. As Principal Research Leader with the Reef Catchments Science Partnership (RCSP) at The University of Queensland, I lead collaborative research programs that bring together researchers, government agencies, industry, natural resource management organisations, and community stakeholders to address complex water quality challenges. Through this work, I generate evidence that supports environmental management, informs policy development, and contributes to improved water quality outcomes for catchments and downstream receiving environments.

My research interests include:

• Catchment and freshwater ecosystem ecology
• Aquatic ecotoxicology and ecological risk assessment
• Pesticide impacts and mixture toxicity in aquatic environments
• Water quality monitoring and assessment
• Sediment, nutrient, and pollutant dynamics
• Agricultural impacts on waterways
• Great Barrier Reef water quality management
• Ecological indicators and environmental reporting
• Catchment restoration, resilience, and adaptive management
• Science-policy integration and collaborative research partnerships

I am passionate about translating science into real-world outcomes and developing partnerships that support sustainable land and water management across Queensland and beyond. My work seeks to provide the evidence needed to improve environmental policy, guide investment and management decisions, and support healthy catchments, waterways, and reef ecosystems for future generations.

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.

RESEARCH INTERESTS Fire Ecology, Restoration Ecology, Ecological Genomics, Wildlife Science, Conservation Biology, Invasive Plants

My research group studies fire ecology and conservation biology. Currently, we are working on:

• Using fire to benefit plant biodiversity and manage invasive plants
• Predicting effects of changing fire regimes on plant-animal interactions
• Native grassland restoration
• Biodiversity in agricultural landscapes

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, wildlife science and environmental science at UQ. My teaching and coordination activities have included Elements of Ecology (AGRC1032), Wildlife Technology (ANIM3018) and People Fire & Environment (ENVM3215 / ENMV7530).

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
• 2015 – 2016 Self-employed Consultant Ecologist, Canberra
• 2012 – 2014 Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Australian National University

EDUCATION

2012 PhD in Ecology, Australian National University

2006 BSc in Biodiversity Conservation Honours, Flinders University

2005 BSc in Biodiversity Conservation, Flinders University

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.