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’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.

Tom is a spatial ecological modeller and software engineer currently working on development and implementation of accelerated new analyses of national and international response of the biota to global change. Recent work includes quantification of climate change, identification of refugia, dynamic metacommunity modelling, climate scenario downscaling, projection of water balance and remote sensing of habitat condition. Previous spatial work includes dispersal ecology, geneflow, epidemiology and microclimate.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Rebecca is an ecologist with research, business and policy experience. She joined CSIRO in 2014, where she leads initiatives and projects in ecology, digital biodiversity platforms and Indigenous domains and their intersections.

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

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.

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 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 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 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 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.