Rebecca is a quantitative ecologist with over 15 years of experience in marine ecology, more than 50 peer review publications and highly developed skills in statistical modelling. Rebecca has experience working across academia, industry and government. Her interests lie at the interface between ecology, numerical modelling and quantitative decision science and she is committed to environmental science research that is of direct relevance to government and industry end users.
Her research focuses on tropical marine ecosystems, where she has contributed to a broad range of topics, including: larval performance, survival, growth and dispersal; patterns and drivers in biodiversity; and anthropogenic impacts. She has developed novel methods for: quantifying biases in research effort and estimating global species richness of coral reefs; stochastic modelling to assess power to detect environmental impacts; population viability analysis; and software to support quantitative expert elicitation.
Most recently Rebecca has been working with the Western Australian Marine Science Institute dredging node using ecological and physical models to: evaluate the likelihood of environmental impacts; explore the relative importance of risk factors on coral reefs using data from past field studies; and develop tools for more appropriate management of future industry projects.