Healthy ecosystems provide a variety of ecosystem services to humans, most obviously provisioning services (food, water, fuel, and shelter), but also regulating services (climate control, disease suppression) and cultural services (recreation and wellbeing).  Biodiversity is fundamental to maintaining ecosystem functionality and resilience, and when biodiversity is adversely affected by human activities such as urbanisation, agriculture, and CO₂ emission, ecosystem services can fail.  Directly or indirectly, the maintenance of biodiversity can prevent the emergence and re-emergence of a variety of public health problems that include exposure to toxins, vector borne diseases, and lifestyle diseases.

My recent work has focused on demonstrating a quantifiable link between healthy ecosystems and healthy humans, using examples of recently ‘created’ public health problems such as Ross River virus infection in salinised landscapes; birth defects in poorly managed water catchments; ciguatera poisoning from bleached reef ecosystems; and leptospirosis in fragmented habitats. Such examples support the idea that biodiversity conservation can benefit both the environment and human health concurrently. To provide a better evidence base for policy generation in this area, more multidisciplinary research is required – including further analyses of the ecological linkages between biodiversity conservation and human health outcomes.

I welcome students and collaborators who have overlapping interests in elucidating the ecological linkages between biodiversity and human health. Specifically, I currently have the following Hons/PhD projects available:

1. ESTABLISHING CLINICAL PATTERNS FOR AUSTRALIAN DIPTERA BITES IN HUMANS

2. BIODIVERSE GREENSPACE EXPOSURE AND HUMAN HEALTH OUTCOMES