ILWS - Institute of Land, Water and Society
Researchers
Dr David Roshier
BSc Sydney, PhD CSturt
Senior Research Fellow
Institute for Land, Water and Society
An ecologist with research interests in waterbird ecology and spatial processes in plant and animal populations, Dr David Roshier graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Science with majors in zoology and biochemistry in 1980.
His particular interest in the ecology of arid ecosystems stems from his last year at university when he went to western NSW as a field assistant on kangaroo research projects. He has been living and working in deserts ever since. After a short stint at Newcastle University as a research assistant he packed for the deserts of the Horn of Africa in 1983.
He spent 15 months in Somalia doing surveys and inventory of plants and soils in the southern rangelands. "The experiences in Somalia changed everything including what I thought I knew about ecology," says David. "It was the start of my interest in spatial patterns in landscapes and the responses of organisms to changes in resource distribution."
The opportunity to explore those ideas didn't come for another 12 years when he began working on waterbirds for his PhD at CSU in 1996. Meantime he held research jobs with the Department of Agriculture at Broken Hill (1987 to 1993) and with the National Avian Research Centre (1993 to 1995) in Abu Dhabi on the Persian Gulf.
Currently he is working on a number of research projects including two major projects funded by the Australian Research Council, 'Why isn't the world full of mistletoe? An integrative approach to understanding dispersal, recruitment and distribution of parasitic plants' ($255,000 Discovery Grant) with Dr David Watson; and 'Integrating the rice industry with biodiversity conservation: the spatial ecology of waterfowl in agricultural and natural landscapes.' ($202,600 Linkage grant) with collaborators Professor Nicholas Klomp, Professor Richard Kingsford (UNSW) and Ross McDonnell ( NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service).
As part of $84,500 project funded by the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation, Game Bird Management Committee, and the Australian Research Council, he is tracking the movements of grey teal fitted with satellite transmitters to understand waterfowl movements in the Riverina and the arid landscapes of central Australia .
He also recently received a $9000 grant from the Commonwealth Government's Wildlife and Exotic Disease Preparedness Program to test genetic techniques on bird specimens from Indonesia held in a museum in the Netherlands . If successful, these specimens will be used as part of a larger proposal to examine the genetic structure of AustroIndonesian waterbird populations and the likely movement of some species between SE Asia and Australia.