Council of Heads of Australasian Herbaria |
Born:
David Eldridge is a Professor in the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of NSW. His research aims to understand more about the impacts of human-induced land uses in drylands, and the links between land-use change and environmental change.
David holds an adjunct position at UNSW under a MOU between UNSW and the New South Wales Office of Environment and Heritage, where he is a Senior Principal Research Scientist. Over the past 15 years he has worked on high-profile research projects on the impacts of livestock grazing in NSW conservation reserves, the effects of feral horses on ecosystem processes, and the impacts of woody plant encroachment on the ecology of semiarid woodlands.
Obtained a BSc, University of Sydney 1973-77
MSc Ecology, Macquarie University 1987-88
PhD Ecology, Macquarie University 1992-94
"In 1991 I had been working with the NSW Soil
Conservation Service for just over a decade, had spent
a year in North Africa with the World Bank, and had just
started a PhD. A federal government grant allowed me to
start a four-year study of the ecology and management
of biocrusts (cryptogams). This work took me all over the
world, to Maralinga to investigate how biocrusts could
stabilise nuclear waste dumps, and to run landholder
(and ANPC) workshops all around Australia. The early 1990s
was a period of personal freedom, when governments
placed more emphasis on science and scientific freedom,
allowing us to pursue research agendas that we believed
were important.
"Without this freedom, substantial
ecological research would never have happened.
We were also trusted to engage with the media, unlike
today when everything is managed. I had stints on Totally
Wild and Burke's Backyard, and a trip to the Great Victoria
Desert to record Australia All Over. Senior managers in my
agency allowed me to work in a university environment,
which was beneficial to everyone. A major legacy of
those working in the late 1980s and early 1990s was that we
amassed a huge repository of ecological data. With new
statistical methods, and faster computers, we are only
now realising the true economic and ecological value of
these large datasets that tell us so much about the health
of Australia's ecosystems nearly half a century ago."
Source: Extracted from:
https://www.bees.unsw.edu.au/our-people/david-eldridge
Australasian Plant Conservation, Vol.30, No.3, Feb 2022 p.8
https://au.linkedin.com/in/david-eldridge-11ba22ba
Portrait Photo: Extracted from: web, Dr David John Eldridge, UNSW Research
research.unsw.edu.au.
Data from 2,810 specimens