Four PhD top-up scholarships for monitoring biodiversity in relation to sustainable
forest management
We are providing four PhD top-up scholarships to use advanced and exciting new ways of
measuring forest biodiversity (birds, beetles and plants) and to use these kinds of data in
developing models for decision making. Students will join a collaborative team on a project
funded by the Australian Research Council: “A new integrated approach for ecologically
sustainable forest management”. Candidates will be able to start any time from the beginning
of 2015, and will be based at either University of Tasmania or University of Melbourne (see
details below). Applicants would be required to obtain their own APA or equivalent baselevel scholarship (see details at the end of this document).
The research will be aimed at developing cutting edge monitoring tools for assessing
biodiversity responses to landscape-scale patterning of mature forest. Together, the projects
will assist forest managers to plan reserve networks within logging landscapes to maintain
functional populations of biodiversity. The new technologies will have wide applicability to
ecological monitoring worldwide. The four PhD projects are:
1. Remote sensing of plants. This project will develop methods to predict forest structure
and species composition from the remote sensing data, including LiDAR from both drones
and planes plus satellite spectral data. The models will be based on data collected by
traditional ecological surveys.
2. Next generation DNA technology for beetles. This project will use the latest molecular
methods to develop barcoding approaches that can identify species and relative abundance of
beetles from field-samples.
3. Analysis of acoustic recording of birds. The bird communities will be characterised by
using acoustic recorders to generate soundscapes and indices of acoustic richness and
dissimilarity and species recognition algorithms.
4. Decision models for landscape design. Pre-existing data combined with data from the
above projects will be used to build decision models to optimise landscape-level harvest
planning and reserve allocation.
The first three positions will be based in Greg Jordan and Sue Baker’s forest ecology lab in
the School of Biological Sciences at UTAS, with fieldwork in both Tasmania and Victoria.
The fourth project will be based in the Vesk Ecology Lab in the School of Botany at
Melbourne University (part of the Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions).
Potential applicants should contact:
Sue Baker (bakers@utas.edu.au) or Greg Jordan (greg.jordan@utas.edu.au)
or, for particular projects:
- Beetles and meta-barcoding: Sue Baker (bakers@utas.edu.au) or Chris Burridge
(Chris.Burridge@utas.edu.au)
- Birds and acoustic sensors: Tim Wardlaw (Tim.Wardlaw@forestrytas.com.au) or Yuliya
Karpievitch (Yuliya.Karpievitch@utas.edu.au)
- Plants and remote sensing: Arko Lucieer (Arko.Lucieer@utas.edu.au)
- Decision theory and forest management planning: Peter Vesk (pvesk@unimelb.edu.au)