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Wetlands and freshwater habitats
Freshwater and wetland habitats are the lungs of our environment, filtering pollutants, supporting biodiversity, and maintaining good water quality.
We use innovative and science-based solutions to restore, preserve, and rehabilitate coastal wetlands. This research is key in developing coastal restoration, optimising water resource allocation, improving carbon storage, protecting coastlines, and boosting biodiversity.
We are using metabarcoding and other innovative techniques to better understand how farming affects nutrient cycling in soils.
Assessing agricultural nutrient recycling using metabarcoding
Research
We are working with the Department for Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water to improve Australia's environmental planning and approval processes for threatened and migratory species and ecological communities.
Improving outcomes for threatened and migratory species and threatened ecological communities
Research
We are developing restoration techniques for oyster reefs and Vallisneria, marking the first Vallisneria restoration in Australia and the first oyster reef restoration in the Australian tropics.
Oyster and Vallisneria restoration with Wanjuru-Yidinji Traditional Owners
Restoration, Community
This project identifies potential wetland restoration sites between Cairns and Gladstone.
Scoping coastal wetlands and suitable trees for blue carbon restoration
Monitoring
Our team is developing guideline values that can protect temporary aquatic ecosystems from contaminants. This will inform and improve mine site operations and rehabilitation in the future.
Monitoring and protection of temporary waters in Northern Australia
Monitoring
We are investigating carbon storage in restoration projects and their role in capturing nutrients from farm runoff.
Carbon storage and nutrient capture in restoration projects
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Restoration, Research
This project has developed a comprehensive roadmap to guide coordinated, large-scale coastal and marine restoration efforts in Australia.
Roadmap to large scale restoration
Research
We use green engineering and nature-based solutions to help industries boost biodiversity, such as fish hotels and improved sea walls.
Nature-based solutions for industries to boost biodiversity
Restoration
We lead the science behind restoration projects, focusing on enhancing biodiversity, maximising carbon storage, and protecting coastlines.
Science-led coastal restoration
Restoration
Projects
Adam Canning
Senior Research Officer
Adam’s interests lie in investigating nature-based solutions to have a productive agricultural landscape within ecologically healthy catchments that support high water security.
He has experience in using network modelling to better under the flow of nutrients (carbon and nitrogen) through catchments and aquatic ecosystems, species distribution modelling, catchment land use planning, sports fish and game bird management, and the interface between freshwater science and policy/planning.
At present, he is on working on how wetlands and regenerative actions can be incorporated into our landscapes to increase food production, improve water quality or buffer against climate change.
Amrit Kumar Mishra
Senior Research Officer
Amrit's research experience is as a coastal marine ecologist, assessing coastal biogeochemistry of marine habitats of tropical marine ecosystems. His areas of specialisation coincide with coastal marine macrophyte (i.e., seagrass, saltmarsh, macroalgae) ecology and the biogeochemical processes that governs the functioning of these coastal ecosystems.
Currently in TropWATER, Amrit is working on wetland restoration of the Queensland coast. His previous research experience includes coastal trace metal pollution monitoring through the use of seagrass and saltmarsh ecosystems as models. Secondly, he is also interested in climate change mitigation capacity of these coastal ecosystems through organic carbon, i.e., blue carbon sequestration and storage and how these ecosystem services can be utilised for conservation and management of coastal ecosystems.
Amrit is also working on the impacts of ocean acidification on seagrass ecosystems and associated biodiversity for the Indian Ocean Region. His research also aims to understand the role of seascape connectivity in influencing climate change mitigation (both Carbon sequestration and ocean acidification) and adaptation strategies of coastal ecosystems and its associated biodiversity. His aim is to link the outcomes of his research to various Sustainable Development Goals.
As an early career researcher, Amrit is aiming to generate new data on existing knowledge gaps on coastal ecology and high-quality science in partnership with government, and external funding agencies.
Barry Butler
Principal Research Officer
Barry is a limnological consultant with more than thirty years experience studying the relationships between ambient water quality, ecological health and anthropogenic pressures in the freshwater ecosystems of northern Australia.
Since joining the current research group at TropWATER (formerly the Australian Centre for Tropical Freshwater Research) in 1990 he has participated in numerous interdisciplinary contract research and consultancy projects for government agencies, resource managers, and industrial clients such as mines and refineries, and has authored in excess of 150 environmental monitoring reports for submission to State and Federal regulatory authorities.
Ben Jarihani
Principal Research Officer
With a fervent commitment to advancing environmental science and water resources engineering, Ben brings a wealth of professional and research excellence to James Cook University. As a seasoned hydrologist and water engineer with over 25 years of industry experience, his expertise spans Environmental Earth Science, Water Resources Engineering, Catchment and Coastal Processes, and Environmental Modelling.
Armed with a PhD in Hydrological Science from the University of Queensland and dual master's degrees in Water Resources Engineering and Remote Sensing/GIS, Ben possesses a robust educational foundation in environmental modelling. His multifaceted career has seen him successfully navigate diverse multidisciplinary research projects, utilising advanced modeling skills and spatial analysis.
In addition to his research prowess, he has demonstrated a dedication to education, delivering courses on Hydrology, Natural Hazards, Geomorphology, Remote Sensing, and GIS at undergraduate and master's levels. Ben has actively mentored students and supervised numerous PhD and Honours candidates, showcasing his commitment to knowledge dissemination.
His interests include water resources management and engineering, watershed management and water quality modelling, environmental modelling (including hydrological and hydrodynamic modelling), hydroinformatics, flood risk assessment and mitigation, water-energy-food nexus, ecohydrology, remote sensing applications in hydrology, natural disasters and resilience to climate extremes, and soil and gully erosion modelling and mapping.
Brendan Ebner
Senior Research Officer
Ebb is an ecologist with expertise in aquatic conservation. His primary interest is at the interface between society and aquatic fauna in freshwater and near shore marine ecosystems.
He champions the application of direct observation and remote video for studying freshwater fishes and this has led to new insights into behaviour of rare and threatened species. This exploration has led to detection of species not previously known to occupy Australian waters and the conservation listing of species. Ebb provides key input to regional, state and national conservation planning in tropical Australia.
Damien Burrows
Director, TropWATER Founder
Professor Damien Burrows is the founding director of TropWATER. He specialises in freshwater, estuarine and coastal aquatic ecosystems and catchment management, and has more than 30 years research experience in the tropics. Damien has spent most of his professional life studying freshwater, estuarine and coastal ecosystems; in particular, applied management in the context of development pressures. He has engaged extensively with industry, community and government from grassroots to policy level.
Damien is the co-Hub leader for the $47 million National Environment Science Programme (NESP) Marine and Coastal Hub (2021–2027). This follows his leadership of the NESP Tropical Water Quality Hub, a six-year $32 million research program (2015–2021) to improve water quality of the Great Barrier Reef and its catchments. The current program has an expanded focus to encompass Australia-wide marine and coastal issues. Damien coordinates research, engagement and knowledge-sharing across multiple and diverse stakeholders.
Damien is also a member of the Independent Expert Panel for the GBR, which advises the state and federal environment ministers about scientific matters. He is on the board of Directors for Townsville-Burdekin-focused natural resource management organisation NQ Dry Tropics and has served on several GBR-related steering committees and boards over his career.
Elle Robertson
PhD student
Elle is currently completing her PhD, broadly examining the response of vertebrate biodiversity to water availability, land condition and grazing in far north Queensland. She has an interdisciplinary and international background, having spent 5 years in the UK completing her BSc and MSc in business management and environmental management respectively. This included 7 weeks spent in Madagascar conducting research for her MSc thesis in 2024, with a focus on the impact of anthropogenic disturbance on avifauna.
Elle has recently worked with a team of international researchers examining opportunities for methane reduction in Australian agriculture and is passionate about stakeholder engagement and multidisciplinary research. Originally from a sheep farm in southern NSW, she is keen to continue her involvement in agriculture and create positive environmental and production outcomes.
Elle’s PhD is supervised by Dr Jack Koci (TropWATER) and Prof Lin Schwartzkopf (College of Science and Engineering, JCU).
Geoffrey Collins
Adjunct Research Fellow
Geoffrey is the Program Manager with OzFish Unlimited and Adjunct Research Fellow with TropWATER and based in Townsville, North QLD. Geoffrey has active projects across all of tropical QLD. He is working on applied research and project delivery with community groups, government, industry and traditional owners.
Geoffrey is also working on a range of environmental restoration and monitoring projects including waterway monitoring and restoration, seagrass restoration, fishway monitoring and mapping tropical shellfish reefs.
Glenn Morgan
Technical Officer
Glenn has worked for TropWATER in the freshwater ecology group since 2005. His main focuses are providing field support to several limnological research projects and technical assistance to establish and maintain laboratory experiments in TropWATER’s aquarium facilities. For example, Glenn is involved in determining the tolerance of a large range of native tropical freshwater and exotic pest fish species to elevated temperatures and low dissolved oxygen. He also runs experiments designed to quantify and maximise the effects of electrofishing on the pest species tilapia.
Glenn has also designed and developed field equipment used to collect water samples and other environmental data. Other key contributions include calibrating, maintaining and operating field equipment including water quality meters, data-loggers, boats and electro-fishers; implementing field surveys involving collecting water, sediment and freshwater biota samples; and conducting macro-invertebrate and fish surveys.
Jordan Iles
Research Fellow
Jordan is an aquatic scientist interested in ecological and biogeochemical processes occurring in freshwater rivers, streams and wetlands. Jordan obtained a Bachelor of Science at the University of Technology, Sydney (2003), and completed his PhD at The University of Western Australia in 2019. His thesis on intermittent rivers and ephemeral streams investigated how nutrients and organic matter are utilised and conserved throughout these systems.
Jordan has broad experience working in remote arid aquatic systems throughout Australia, spending many years wading through wetlands of the Murray-Darling Basin, chasing ephemeral streams and waterholes in the arid Pilbara, and exploring mountain streams in the tropics. He takes a mechanistic approach to investigating environmental and ecological issues. He is interested in all the small things that do the heavy lifting to make ecosystems work – like algae, macrophytes, charophytes, macroinvertebrates and microcrustaceans – and putting them in the big picture.
Jordan is involved with water quality and monitoring projects for North Queensland Bulk Ports; the Mackay-Whitsunday-Isaac Healthy Rivers to Reef Partnership; and some tourism and groundwater-centred projects in the Whitsundays and Torres Strait, respectively.
Justin Perry
Adjunct Senior Research Fellow
Justin had been intimately involved with conservation management, Indigenous land management and biodiversity monitoring/ecology in Northern Australia since the late 90s. Living and working in remote areas of the Northern Territory and Queensland has exposed him to the inherent limitations and challenges faced by land mangers in remote areas.
He leads interdisciplinary projects that work with land managers (predominately Indigenous ranger groups) to develop robust monitoring of values with a specific emphasis on the impact of threatening processes such as feral animals and fire on the plants and animals.
The main focus of this work has been to collaboratively develop appropriate frameworks and tools for measuring the success of environmental projects in relation to biodiversity conservation.
Nathan Waltham
Senior Principal Research Officer
Nathan has a deep interest in coastal landscape ecology and urbanisation, which has developed growing up on the Gold Coast in southeast Queensland, Australia. He completed a BSc in Marine Biology/Aquaculture in 1997 at Southern Cross University (Lismore) and post graduate studies in environmental management at Griffith University in 2001.
Nathan has worked in local government (Gold Coast City Council) for 13 years. His PhD research investigated the habitat, role and value of artificial urban waterways (residential canal estates), which are an obvious and major feature of the worlds’ estuaries.
Nathan’s research interests include ecosystem responses (freshwater, marine and estuarine) to urbanisation and landscape change, ecosystem health assessment, fish ecology, water quality, and modelling optimal mitigation responses to protect and enhance waterways and catchments.
Richard Pearson
Emeritus Professor
Richard was employed at JCU as Senior Tutor in Zoology in 1974, eventually becoming Professor in 1999. He was successful in his 1988 funding application to the federal government to establish the Australian Centre for Tropical Freshwater Research (ACTFR, now TropWATER) and became its Deputy Director, moving to Director in the mid-90s. He was appointed as Head of the new School of Tropical Biology in 1999 and subsequently relinquished the directorship of the ACTFR. During this time, he continued to teach, supervise postgraduate students and undertake research, for which he had continuous funding from several sources.
Richard initially investigated the effects of river pollution by sugar mills, followed by projects associated with the sugar industry and Cooperative Research Centres for Rainforest Management and the Great Barrier Reef. For the rainforest CRC he investigated the ecology of pristine tropical streams and continued that work beyond retirement in an international programme on stream ecology. He led the original joint CRC Catchment to Reef programme, and he worked for several years on the ecology of the Burdekin River.
Richard has authored at least 70 technical reports and over 160 refereed journal papers and book chapters. He supervised more than 70 postgraduate students. He continues to collaborate with TropWATER staff and others, and to write up his and his students’ research results.
Rory Mulloy
Research Officer
Rory’s interest in coastal marine science began in the waters of Tobago in the Caribbean where he worked on a citizen science project conducting coral reef health monitoring. Since then he has completed a Master of Science majoring in Protected Area Management from James Cook University and conducted a PhD in ecological engineering at CQUniversity’s Coastal Marine Ecosystems Research Centre (CMERC). Rory’s work has involved roles in project management for NGOs leading reef health impact assessments, as a science educator on board National Geographic expeditions and as a principal investigator in restoration research projects. His PhD research focused on nature-based solutions for industrial port design and specifically how urban coastal infrastructure can be developed to incorporate habitat provision for mangroves and benthic ecosystems.
Throughout his research career Rory has been involved in a range of projects monitoring coastal ecosystems including mangroves, seagrass, and wetlands alongside water quality and fishery assessment projects. His research interests are centered on coastal restoration and the development of applied solutions to coastal development that minimise impacts on marine ecosystems.
Sarah McDonald
Research Officer
Sarah’s passion lies in understanding the impact of human actions on the aquatic environment, with specific regards to ephemeral systems such as urban stormwater and dry streambeds in the wet-dry tropics.
Her field of special competence is water and sediment quality assessment, focusing on the quantification of the form (speciation), behaviour (bioavailability) and ecotoxicological impact (bioaccumulation) of chemical contaminants and stressors, and the development of suitable ecological monitoring tools to measure and mitigate these impacts. She has a deep and varied understanding of the national water quality guidelines framework and the application of the guidelines in complex ephemeral systems.
Her additional capabilities include knowledge on the role of dissolved organic matter (DOM) in aquatic ecosystems, it’s characteristics and effect on the speciation and toxicity of chemical contaminants. She also has experience conducting research in the field of radioecology.
Sigit Deni Sasmito
Senior Research Officer
Sigit Sasmito is a wetlands ecologist who has more than 12 years of experience in researching to assess the roles and impacts of tropical wetlands for climate change mitigation and adaptation, especially through peatland and blue carbon ecosystems.
His research interests focus on carbon monitoring, greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory, ecosystem restoration assessment and natural carbon capture and removal. He uses multiple approaches such as systematic review and meta-analysis, spatial mapping and field assessment. His works are closely relevant to policies and decision-makers, specifically by providing science-based evidence on how to include wetlands conservation and restoration into national emissions reduction targets.
He holds a PhD in Environmental Science from Charles Darwin University, Australia and a BSc in Applied Meteorology from IPB University, Indonesia. He has previous extensive research collaboration experiences at the National University of Singapore and CIFOR-ICRAF in Indonesia. Sigit is an active member of Science Technical Working Group for UN Global Ocean Decade Programme for Blue Carbon (GO-BC).
Tertius de Kluyver
Adjunct Senior Research Fellow
Tertius has applied his marine science, biochemistry, and occupational hygiene knowledge and skills across a range of environmental issues over a forty-year career. Early career highlights include helping to establish Tasmania’s first oyster hatchery at Bicheno, managing asbestos and other environmental issues within Queensland’s state schools, undertaking research across a range of environmental disciplines at the CSIRO Marine Laboratories (Cleveland, Qld), Lions Cancer Institute (UQ), and at QUT, and developing and teaching a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses on environmental management and marine science in Australia and the USA.
Tertius entered the Commonwealth Public Service on return from the USA, initially working on air quality policy development. Here he developed the emission models and cost benefit analysis that led to the establishment of Australia’s first emission standards for non-road two-stroke petrol engines.
Tertius then moved to the Climate Change Division and over the following decade worked as a member of the team that produces Australia’s annual greenhouse gas accounts reported to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). He specialised in waste and land-based emissions and was singularly responsible for establishing the wetland greenhouse gas accounts for coastal wetlands (mangroves, tidal marsh and seagrass), farm dams and reservoirs. He later collaborated with Australian academics to improve the farm-dam and reservoir accounts resulting in two co-authorships on peer-reviewed papers, with a third currently in preparation.
In retirement Tertius continues to be actively involved in promoting the work of the UNFCCC as a registered member of the Roster of Experts (RoE), the group that undertakes formal audits of all annual GHG accounts and associated reports submitted to the UNFCCC. Tertius is also lead author on four draft IUCN Red List of Ecosystem Assessments for Australia’s mangrove communities and is finalising this work in collaboration with JCU and other Australian scientists.
Thomas Stieglitz
Adjunct Associate Professor
With a background in physics and biogeography, as well as economics, Thomas Stieglitz’s research in the coastal zone covers a wide range of subjects. His interests range from coastal hydrology, in particular submarine groundwater discharge, to seafloor geomorphology and benthic ecology, including benthic habitats and animal-habitat interaction.
Thomas’ work is divided between academic research, research-for-management and scientific consulting, including working with the European Centre for Research and Education in Environmental Geosciences (CEREGE) in France.
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