Dr Brad Law
This Wednesday 8 June Forestry Australia will host a webinar featuring Dr Brad Law and Dr Leroy Gonsalves of the NSW Department of Primary Industries (DPI). Source: Timberbiz
Dr Law will provide an overview about the recent koala research by NSW DPI. The research has been multi-faceted and has developed new acoustic based surveys that have proved very effective in detecting male koala bellows in the breeding season.
The research began with regional scale occupancy surveys over hundreds of sites on both public and private tenures. This has been followed by site scale investigations using density estimates from acoustic arrays before and after timber harvesting and the black summer fires.
Finally, GPS-tracking has provided detailed information on how individual animals use the forestry landscape. Ongoing monitoring of occupancy in north-east NSW is broadly tracking the status of the species over time.
The second topic in the seminar will focus on how fauna respond to mechanical forest fuel reduction and burning as Australia is the most bushfire-prone continent.
Several treatment options are available to land managers seeking to reduce fire risk, including prescribed burning and mechanical thinning, both of which can change fire hazard by reducing fuels, though this may be dependent on the extent to which residues are removed following mechanical treatment and fire weather conditions.
Dr Gonsalves will provide a report on the short-term effects of thinning, burning and a combination of both on habitat structural complexity as well as direct responses of birds, bats and ground mammals on the north coast of NSW.
Dr Law is a Principal Research Scientist at the Forest Science Unit of the Department of Primary Industries focusing on ecologically sustainable forest management practices who has over 30 years of experience in forest wildlife ecology and has published more than 150 peer reviewed papers. His research covers all types of wildlife including bats, pygmy possums, Hastings River Mouse, eucalypt flowering and nectar and most recently koalas.
Dr Gonsalves is a research scientist in the Forest Science Unit of the Department of Primary Industries. His research focuses on the responses of fauna to forest management and disturbance, in particular thinning and fire. He also undertakes spatial modelling (species occupancy and habitat models) for threatened species and more recently has worked to develop single species recognisers for automated identification of acoustic forest monitoring data.
Register here
