I am a fire and vegetation ecologist at the University of Melbourne, with a particular fondness for tropical landscapes. My research focuses on the processes that have shaped and maintain tropical vegetation, especially the fire-mediated nexus between savannas and rainforests, and how fire can be best managed to maintain biodiversity.
My current research projects are:
- understanding how fire regimes affect small mammals in northern Australia's tropical savannas, and whether appropriate fire management can help slow their rapid decline;
- evaluating the generality of the widely accepted paradigm that 'pyrodiversity begets biodiversity';
- identifying optimal fire regimes for biodiversity in northern Australia's savannas, and tradeoffs with other fire management objectives (e.g. greenhouse gas abatement);
- understanding whether fire management can increase carbon storage in woody biomass in northern Australia's savannas, for the generation of carbon credits;
- using community-level approaches to predicting the distribution of biodiversity, based on limited presence-only data.