BUSHFIRE HUB - Key Persons
Bridget is researching how the fire regime affects reptiles and frogs in the Greater Sydney and Blue Mountains area, an area which experiences a long-term and modified history of fire. Herpetofauna are some of our most threatened and endemic species, however we know relatively little about how the long-term pattern of fire affects them and the habitat they use. This knowledge is key to understanding how we can incorporate conservation values into forest management.
Professor David Bowman holds a research chair in Pyrogeography and Fire Science in the School of Natural Sciences and is the Director of the transdisciplinary Fire Centre at the University of Tasmania.
He is developing the transdisciplinary field of pyrogeography that provides a synthetic understanding of landscape burning that unites human, physical and biological dimensions of fire from the geological past into the future and spanning local to global geographic scales.
Job Titles:
- Research Assistant for Professor
Alex has also worked as a Research Assistant for Professor David Keith and Dr Mark Ooi at UNSW, assessing a method for recording post-fire recovery of plants in response to different elements of the fire regime. Alex has also assisted in monitoring for threatened species Asterolasia buxifolia and Prostanthera discolour.
Job Titles:
- Lead Researcher, University of Tasmania
Dr Grant Williamson is a landscape and fire ecologist, whose previous research has included the impacts of mosquito control and climate change on mangrove communities, the climatic and human drivers of wildfires and fire danger across Australia, and the dynamics and impact of wildfire and prescribed fire smoke on human health.
Grant is interested in applying novel technology including remote sensing and high-performance computing to help understand fire on earth. He completed his PhD at the University of Adelaide, and has worked in Darwin and Hobart, and is currently a research fellow for the NSW Advanced Bushfire Research Hub and an affiliate with the Centre for Air Pollution, Energy and Health Research (CAR-CRE).
Job Titles:
- Lead Researcher, University of Wollongong
- Research Fellow at the Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires
Hamish Clarke studies the drivers and effects of planned and unplanned fire, both historically and under climate change. Dr Clarke is committed to long term engagement with those who use, support and are affected by research. He is co-founder of the popular Blue Mountains community science initiative Science at the Local.
Hamish Clarke is a research fellow at the Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires at the University of Wollongong and is also part of the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment at Western Sydney University. He is interested in the drivers of bushfire risk and the effects of planned and unplanned fire, with research to date focusing on fire weather, climate change and prescribed burning.
Prior to joining academia, Hamish worked for the NSW environment department. He is committed to public interest science and effective engagement with decision-makers. Hamish also runs the Blue Mountains community science initiative Science at the Local and is the creator of the four friends of fire science animation.
Job Titles:
- Lead Researcher, University of Wollongong
Katharine is a human geographer specialising in environmental change. Her research focuses on building resilience and adaptation through community and youth-centred initiatives. Katharine has a special interest in participatory processes and action research as a means for understanding and enhancing community-based adaptation and risk reduction.
Katharine has also conducted a number of post-disaster investigations involving in-depth interviews with residents following the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, the 2009 heatwave in SA and VIC, the 2010-2011 floods in QLD, NSW and VIC, the 2013 Blue Mountains bushfires and the 2017 NSW Northern Rivers floods. Her PhD (2005) investigated the communication of volcanic risk between scientists, policy makers and the public on the Island of Montserrat, W.I.
In 2015, she was awarded the Australian Academy of Science Prize for Innovation, Research and Education (ASPIRE) for the most important contributions in the area of Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation for a scientist under the age of 40.
Job Titles:
- Lead Researcher, University of New South Wales
Mark Ooi is a plant ecologist and works as a Senior Research Fellow based at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, where he is a member of the Centre for Ecosystem Science. He runs a lab focused on fire and plant ecology, and is particularly interested in studying functional traits, and particularly seeds, and their role in the ecology of threatened species.
Mark's research encompasses several themes in fire ecology, including plant population recovery in response to fires occurring in different seasons, and the impact of fires of different severities. He has ongoing collaborative projects from studies conducted in the fire-prone cerrado in Brazil and sand dune annual plant communities in Europe. He has written over 50 published papers and book chapters and given invited talks in Brazil, China, the UK and the USA.
Job Titles:
- Lead Researcher, Western Sydney University
Rachael's current research is focused on developing better tools for predicting bushfires and planning prescribed burns. Specifically, Rachael is building models of fuel accumulation rates and fuel dryness for NSW.
Professor Matthias Boer's research interests focus on the biogeosciences, landscape ecology and management of fire-prone environments. He is particularly interested in the biophysics of current and future fire regimes, and in the interactions between changing climate, atmospheric [CO2], land use and vital ecosystem services.
Matthias joined the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment in 2011, after previous research positions with Cemagref in France (2010), The University of Western Australia (2004-2010), the CSIC - Arid Zone Research Station in Spain (1993-1999; 2001-2003), and CSIRO's Centre for Arid Zone Research in Central Australia (1999-2001). Matthias received his PhD in Physical Geography (1999) from Utrecht University, The Netherlands.
Job Titles:
- Associate Research Fellow at the Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires
- Researcher, University of Wollongong
Michael is an Associate Research Fellow at the Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires, where he works on package 3 researching smoke effects from prescribed fires.
Michael grew up on a family farm near Bathurst NSW, before studying environmental science at Charles Sturt University in Albury. He completed Honours research at the University of Wollongong, where he also worked as a research assistant. Michael's PhD at the University of Wollongong focused on bushfire behaviour in southern Australia, particularly spotting and rate of spread using infrared line scans. His main interest is in using spatial data and remote sensing to analyse different aspects of bushfires. Apart from work in working in research, Michael worked as a Project Firefighter, Planned Burning Officer and Fire Risk Analyst for Forest Fire Management Victoria.
Nicolás's PhD project is an attempt to combine research and practice from diverse areas with the purpose of developing an integrated assessment framework that will allow practitioners to objectively evaluate the smoke health impacts that wildfire risk reduction strategies impose on society and the environment. In particular, he will seek to introduce economic assessments such as cost-benefit analysis which will be used to quantify the likely health impacts in monetary terms ($AUD) and to construct various economic metrics that may be used to better inform fire management policy.
Nicolás is a PhD Candidate in Medical Sciences at the Menzies Institute for Medical Research from the University of Tasmania. His research interests involve the application of engineering-type tools, economics, and modelling to policy-related environmental and energy problems. During his PhD, he will introduce health impact and economic assessments into the evaluation of wildfire risk reduction strategies. Nicolás comes from Chile where he completed his undergraduate studies as an Industrial Engineer with a Diploma in Environmental Engineering at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. After working several years as an environmental and sustainability consultant, he completed a Master of Environment at the University of Melbourne in Australia. On his return to Chile in 2014 he worked as an environmental data analyst at the Environmental Enforcement Agency, where he gained better knowledge about environmental regulations and the use of analytics tools for data manipulation and the assessment of environmental compliance. With more than ten years of working experience in areas such as air quality and human health impacts, public policy, public health, environmental regulations and analytics, decision-support systems, Nicolás looks forward to merging this knowledge into applicable tools and frameworks that will contribute to improve human wellbeing.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Director of the Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires
Owen is the Director of the Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires and the Bushfire Risk Management Research Hub, he also leads Work Package 3 researching air quality in prescribed fires.
Job Titles:
- Emeritus Professor
- Home / Team / Emeritus Professor
Ross Bradstock was the founder of the Bushfire Hub and the ex-Director of the Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires. His research interests include Fire ecology, Conservation biology, Landscape ecology and Climate change. Ross is dedicated to the development of a quantitative understanding of risks posed by landscape fires to multiple values and the way such risks can be altered through cost-effective management and global change.
Ross came to the University of Wollongong from NSW NPWS where he had established himself as one of the world's leading fire ecologists. His reputation in the field of fire ecology and management has continued to grow, and his achievements and contributions are recognised internationally. He has published more than 120 peer-reviewed journal papers and book chapters, four books on fire ecology and two on biodiversity conservation and management. He has also written more than twenty major scientific reports and policy documents.
Todd will analyse the historical and projected trends in fuel moisture, using it as a proxy for fire potential. He will focus on both the global and finer-scale regional patterns. His regional analyses will include a jumping-off point for a) modelling NSW's fire history and identifying its climate controls in order to predict regional changes in wildfire risk under different climate projections; and b) modelling NSW's past fire regime and return intervals in order to reconstruct censored fire histories and benefit government fire management.
Tom is a PhD candidate at the University of NSW studying how fire seasonality is changing at global and local scales and the consequences for plant ecology. The project is particularly focused on the ecological context for changing fire seasonality across different ecoregions, exploring the mechanisms through which these changes may affect plant populations and understanding what this means for species persistence. Prior to undertaking this PhD Tom work as a Senior Scientist at the Department of Primary Industry and Environment conducting threatened species risk assessments on plants around NSW.