ILWS - Institute of Land, Water and Society
Researchers
Dr Paul Humphries
BSc Hons, MSc, PhD
Lecturer in environmental and applied statistics
School of Environmental Sciences
Dr Paul Humphries has studied and worked in the area of fish and aquatic ecology for 22 years. In 1987 he completed an MSc at the University of Tasmania , studying life history variation in river and lakedwelling fish, and then carried out a PhD at Murdoch University in community ecology and habitat use of fish in a Western Australian estuary.
He then migrated east again, to work for three and a half years in Tasmania at the Inland Fisheries Commission, investigating the role of flow and habitat use of fish, plants and macro invertebrates in several large, lowland rivers.
In late 1994, Paul took a position with the CRC for Freshwater Ecology, at the Murray Darling Freshwater Research Centre in Albury, designing and running what became known as the Campaspe Project; an ecosystemscale environmental flow manipulation. After almost 10 years there, little rain, but enormous amounts of data, he started in 2004 with Charles Sturt University in Albury, continuing his research into river and fish ecology and lecturing in statistics.
Paul's work, in collaboration with colleagues and students, has contributed to the understanding of how fish and macro invertebrates relate to flow and the riverine environment and has translated into improved management.
He has more recently begun to investigate historical aspects of rivers and their fishy inhabitants to gain some insights into the patterns and problems that we see today. In 2005 he spent four months with the National Library of Australia in Canberra on a Harold White Fellowship, researching historical accounts of fish in the Murray River .
Currently he is supervising five PhD students and is leading a $570,000 Murray Darling Basin Commission funded project in collaboration with the MurrayDarling Freshwater Research Centre: "Spawning and recruitment of fish in managed rivers."
Paul has published a number of papers in his areas of research interest, including a 2005 paper on the Spawning time and early life history of Murray Cod, published in Environmental Biology of Fishes 72:393407.
One of his big concerns is the effect of the current drought on fish populations in our inland waterways. (Opinion)