Brett finished working for the University of Melbourne (UoM) at the end of 2014, moving on to Charles Darwin University.
He was a fire and vegetation ecologist at the University of Melbourne, with a particular fondness for tropical landscapes. His research focused on the processes that shaped and maintain tropical vegetation, especially the fire-mediated nexus between savannas and rainforests, and how fire can be best managed to maintain biodiversity.
His research projects with CEED and UoM included:
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- understanding how fire regimes affect small mammals in northern Australia's tropical savannas, and whether appropriate fire management can help slow their rapid decline;
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- evaluating the generality of the widely accepted paradigm that 'pyrodiversity begets biodiversity';
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- identifying optimal fire regimes for biodiversity in northern Australia's savannas, and tradeoffs with other fire management objectives (e.g. greenhouse gas abatement);
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- understanding whether fire management can increase carbon storage in woody biomass in northern Australia's savannas, for the generation of carbon credits;
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- using community-level approaches to predicting the distribution of biodiversity, based on limited presence-only data.