Research

Please check out the QAECO research areas as well as my Opportunities tab and get in touch if you’d like to join my team.

Ongoing projects

Where will trees move under climate change and how should we protect them to facilitate successful movement?

Recent projections show major shifts in the habitat suitability for trees across North America due to climate change. However, taken as is, they assume trees can immediately respond to climate change. We’re currently working to combine these models to quantify our best understanding tree range shift predictions, their uncertainty, and what they mean for management. These shifting ranges could mean that new areas will be preferred sites for monitoring or management interventions compared to current priorities. Interestingly, a Northward shift in the ranges of Canada’s trees could allow for cheaper land to become more valuable from a conservation perspective. The Canadian arm of the project is already funded through a Canadian National Science and Engineering Research Council’s Alliance granting scheme with partners at Environment and Climate Change Canada and the Nature Conservancy of Canada, but the aim is to expand it to the Australian context.

This project will combine several highly uncertain tree and climate datasets with tree dispersal models built from the recently created BIOShifts database to estimate future tree distributions in a way that accounts for seed dispersal capacity. These models will use my existing invasive species dispersal modelling framework as a basis. The creation of these more complex models with uncertainty can help answer the question of whether conservation actions targeting trees should be changed to account for the predicted shift in their distributions. These include interventions like protected area establishment, monitoring activities, and active tree planting.

Lab members involved: Luping Zhang

Urban tree risk mapping for the City of Melbourne (Honours or Masters project)

The City of Melbourne are interested in understanding pest and weed threats that hamper their commitment to their Urban Forest strategy. Our aim is to produce a web app to visualise pest threats in the City of Melbourne as well as priority areas for management. This would be an extension of their existing Urban Forest Map.

The City of Melbourne’s urban tree inventory will be overlaid with pest and weed survey data, which will be fed into models to forecast future threat scenarios. The student will be in charge of building these pest spread and tree distributional models by extending models I’ve already published. All of these data and model outputs will be used to develop a web app in Shiny or similar for City of Melbourne residents to examine pest threats near them and inform municipal planning for urban plant health. We intend to make the web app available through the City of Melbourne’s webpage and through an open source GitHub repository (or equivalent).

Lab members involved: Ruiting Qian