Geoffrey Gurr

Professor Geoffrey Gurr

Insect Ecologist

Agricultural, Environmental and Veterinary Sciences

Biography

Professor Gurr is well known internationally for his work on applied insect ecology and developing ecologically-based strategies to harmonise agriculture with the environment. Following doctoral training at Imperial College and the National Institute of Agricultural Botany in Cambridge, his work over the last three decades has spanned biological control of insect pests, plant defence, insect-vectored plant pathogens, chemical and molecular ecology. His chief contribution has been to develop strategies for promoting the activity of natural enemies of pests and simultaneously delivering other ecosystem services that build resilience in farming systems. These methods are used on increasing numbers of farms in Australia and overseas. In China, for example, the use of companion crops beside rice crops to attract beneficial insects that control pests has become nationally-recommended policy. Reflecting the real-world impact of his research, he won Engagement Australia’s excellence award for Outstanding Research Engagement in 2020. Such work has been the subject of two of the three books for which he was senior editor and many of his more than 200 scientific papers that include Nature Plants, Nature Genetics, Nature Communications, PNAS and Annual Review of Entomology.

Research
  • Applied insect-plant ecology
  • Biological control of pests
  • Biodiversity and ecosystem services
  • Sustainable agriculture
  • Insect vector-phytoplasma-plant interactions
  • Developing country cropping systems
Publications
Full publications list on CRO

Recent Publications

  • Akter, S., Rizvi, S. Z. M., Haque, A., Reynolds, O. L., Furlong, M. J., Melo, M. C., Osborne, T., Mo, J., McDonald, S., Johnson, A. C., & Gurr, G. M. (2023). Continent-wide evidence that landscape context can mediate the effects of local habitats on in-field abundance of pests and natural enemies. Ecology and Evolution, 13(1), [e9737]. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.9737
  • Ma, L., Weeraratne, K. N., Gurusinghe, S., Aktar, J., Haque, K. M. S., Eberbach, P., Gurr, G. G., & Weston, L. A. (2023). Dung beetle activity Is soil-type-dependent and modulates pasture growth and associated soil microbiome. Agronomy, 13(2), [325]. https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy13020325
  • Ma, L., Weeraratne, N., Gurusinghe, S., Aktar, J., Haque, KMS., Eberbach, P., Gurr, GG., & Weston, LA. (2023). Dung Beetle Activity Is Soil-Type-Dependent and Modulates Pasture Growth and Associated Soil Microbiome. https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy13020325
  • Gurr, G., Liu, J., Pickett, J. A., & Stevenson, P. C. (2023). Review of the chemical ecology of homoterpenes in arthropod–plant interactions. Austral Entomology. https://doi.org/10.1111/aen.12629
  • Noriega, J. A., Halliday, B., Weston, P., Thotagamuwa, A., & Gurr, G. (2022). Beyond phoresy: symbioses between dung beetles (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae: Scarabaeinae) and mites (Acari). Entomologia Generalis, 42(4), 499-513. https://doi.org/10.1127/entomologia/2021/1406