Professor Max Finlayson

Director

Professor Max Finlayson

BSc(Hons) UWA, PhD JCU

Professor of Ecology and Biodversity

Prof Max Finlayson's appointment in December 2007 as Professor of Ecology and Biodiversity with Charles Sturt University and director of the Institute, is his first position with a university in a career that has taken him to many parts of the world.

Max, a wetland ecologist with a strong interest in wetland management and communication, intends to draw on his considerable experience and bring an Institute focus to major global issues such as adapting to climate change from a social and ecological perspective; the benefits and problems of biofuels; and the effects of environmental health on human health and agriculture and vice versa.

Max has worked extensively on the inventory, assessment and monitoring of wetlands in wet tropical, wet-dry tropical and sub-tropical climatic regimes covering pollution, invasive species and climate change. This has variously included local communities and collaboration with other expert groups.

"Building bridges between technical experts and local communities has been a long-time interest and at times a bigger challenge than expected," says Max who has many links to international organisations. He is the past chair of the Ramsar Wetland Convention's Scientific and Technical Review Panel with an emphasis on inventory and assessment, local community and management, invasive species, wetlands and human health, and wetlands and agriculture. He is still involved in that organisation as an invited expert on wetlands and agriculture, and assisting with wetlands and human health.

From 2001 to 2007 he was president of Wetland International's Supervisory Council, at a time when the organisation needed rebuilding and re-orienting, and accountable management. Over the past years he has been involved in several major global assessments looking at the interactions between people, ecology and water. These include:

Late in 2007 he was appointed as one of five members of the scientific advisory council to the influential Biological Station Tour Du Valat in The Camargue, France, an independent research and training institution.

Max was born at Mt Barker in WA and grew up at Albany on the south-west WA coast, and was encouraged to go to University by his teachers.

"I chose ecological science, though at the time there were so specific ecology courses, because I liked being in the bush and the swamps and the (degraded) lands that surrounded our little towns and realised the extent of the damage and losses," says Max who started a combined Botany and Zoology course at the University of Western Australia but settled on botany.

He went on to do his Honors in aquatic ecology and chemistry looking at nitrogen cycling in the lakes around Perth. For his PhD studies Max went to James Cook University at Townsville for a project looking at water pollution and aquatic weeds (salvinia) in the artificial lakes created down stream of the mines at Mt Isa.

From 1980-83 he worked with CSIRO Irrigation Research at Griffith on aquatic weed control and using water plants to treat waste water; from 1983-89 for the Office of the Supervising Scientist in the Alligator Rivers Region at Kakadu in the Northern Territory researching the effects of uranium mining on the floodplain environment; and from 1989-93 with an NGO, the International Waterbird and Wetland Research Bureau, based in the U.K at Slimbridge in Gloucester.

While there Max worked on wetlands conservation projects and capacity building in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Eastern Africa and the Mediterranean.

"It was at the time in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union when the communist system collapsed with pros and cons for conservation and huge social dislocation," says Max. "We were working with people and the environment." One of the large projects was a conservation plan for the Volga delta at the top of the Caspian Sea in Russia.

The work in Eastern Africa was mostly in training but in South Africa his work involved arguing against the expansion of mineral sands mining into the St Lucia Nature Reserve.

In 1993, Max returned to Kakadu and a research/managerial job with the Office of the Supervising Scientist that resulted in the establishment of a major tropical wetland research and conservation program with significant international links. In 2000 he left Kakadu for Darwin as director of the Environmental Research Institute for the Office of Supervising Scientists. After five years in administrative management, he took up a position as a principal researcher (ecology) with the International Water Management Institute at Colombo in Sri Lanka where his research work included major projects on people's livelihoods and agriculture and wetlands, across eight different countries in southern Africa.

Max has contributed to over 200 journal articles, reports, guidelines, proceedings and book chapters on wetland ecology and management. He has contributed to the development of concepts and methods for wetland inventory, assessment and monitoring; led various seminars, workshops, panels and training courses; and been an invited speaker at various international conferences.

He lists his goals as including:

Publication List and Projects

Contact

Email: mfinlayson@csu.edu.au

Phone: 02 6051 9779