People

Simon Ferrier

  • Simon leads scientific innovation in developing and applying a new generation of models. These approaches view biodiversity from a more holistic macroecological or “top down” perspective and focus on collective properties of biodiversity as a more powerful and cost-effective means of encompassing the highly diverse, yet lesser known and/or poorly sampled, biological groups into practical conservation assessment, and across extensive regions.

Karel Mokany

  • Karel’s research focuses on developing and applying new macroecological modelling approaches to improve the information available for making decisions that influence biodiversity.  He is particularly interested in better incorporating important ecological processes into macroecological modelling techniques.

Chris Ware

  • Chris is an experimental scientist working on approaches to evaluating forecasts of biodiversity change by using knowledge of biodiversity responses to past climatic changes. Current projects include the development of a framework for evaluating biodiversity models using palaeoclimate simulations, and downscaling palaeoclimate simulations.

Kate Giljohann

  • Kate undertakes ecological modelling and analysis to support environmental decisions and improve conservation outcomes. She collaborates with researchers and partners to design new approaches that build ecological knowledge and incorporate biodiversity into decision making.

Roozbeh Valavi

  • Roozbeh is a quantitative spatial ecologist specialising in geospatial analysis, data science, and statistical ecological modelling, dedicated to addressing real-world challenges.

Mathew Vickers

  • Mat is a quantitative ecologist with diverse skills and experience.

Jinyan Yang

  • Jinyan is undertaking a Postdoctoral Fellowship with the team, developing new approaches to dynamically model habitat condition for biodiversity.

Becky Schmidt

  • Becky is a research scientist focusing on methods to develop, integrate and deliver knowledge that informs decision making. Her expertise in developing and implementing novel methods for delivering and reporting integrated assessments has been central to many of CSIRO’s high-impact contributions to complex sustainability challenges.

Affiliates and Alumni

Andrew Hoskins

  • Andrew Hoskins undertook a postdoctoral fellowship (2014-2017) with the team, working on new approaches for modelling biodiversity data. He developed methods for deriving and modelling community level metrics from the kinds of messy presence only data sets that are commonly found within ecological databases. He is now a senior research scientist in CSIRO.

Warren Muller

  • Warren is a retired statistician who is a CSIRO Honorary Fellow and is co-located with the Canberra members of the team. In his long career in CSIRO, both when employed and after official retirement, he has collaborated in many projects with many CSIRO scientists, mainly in the biological and environmental sciences.

Kristen Williams

  • Kristen’s expertise is in spatial ecological modelling and biodiversity conservation planning. Collectively, her work tests the hypothesis that incorporating system understanding of ecology and environment in land evaluation research will result in more enduring planning and policy decisions, when coupled with a participatory action-research process. 

Tom Harwood

  • Tom is a spatial ecological modeller and software engineer who worked in the team from 2010 to 2023. He is currently at Oxford University.

Rebecca Pirzl

  • Rebecca is an ecologist with research, business and policy experience. She worked with CSIRO from 2014 to 2023.

Sam Andrew

  • Sam undertook a Postdoctoral Fellowship as part of the Environomics Future Science Platform aiming to explore how genomic and phenotypic variation can be used to explain the range of climates plant species occupy.

Moreno DiMarco

  • Moreno was a research scientist in the team, working on global-scale conservation planning and macroecological analyses in the context of international biodiversity targets.

Alex Bush

  • Alex undertook a postdoctoral fellowship (2014-2016) with the team, working as part of the GBACC project, studying how estimates of resilience and evolutionary adaptation can be incorporated into species and community-level projections under climate change.

Hugh Burley

  • Hugh completed a PhD with the team, being based at UNSW. His project investigated the macroecological links between ecosystem processes (such as productivity) and beta diversity across a range of spatio-temporal scales and biological levels, and whether the ecosystem processes within biologically heterogeneous (higher β-diversity) regions display greater resilience to environmental change?

James McCarthy

  • James completed a PhD with the team, being based at the University of Queensland. His project focused on extending existing macroecological modelling approaches to incorporate abundance, size class and functional trait information to model plant community composition, ecosystem productivity (using metabolic theory) and functional change under climate change.

Christiana McDonald-Spicer

  • Christiana was a PhD student based at the Australian National University, co-supervised by Simon Ferrier, Craig Moritz and others. Christiana developed and applied community-level modelling approaches to identify refugia, focusing on reptiles in the monsoonal tropics of northern Australia.

Renee Catullo

  • Renee undertook a postdoctoral fellowship (2012-2015) with Simon Ferrier as part of a large, multi-institution grant investigating the genomic basis for adaptation to climate change. She developed a framework for incorporating physiological limits and adaptive evolution into spatial predictions of climate change.