Skye Wassens

Professor Skye Wassens

Ecologist

Agricultural, Environmental and Veterinary Sciences

Biography

Professor Skye Wassens is an internationally recognised ecologist specialising in the ecology and conservation of wetland dependant amphibians. Her research on the responses of amphibians to environmental flooding and amphibian water requirements has led the way for the inclusion of amphibians into environmental flooding programs throughout the Murray-Darling Basin. Her research on wetland dependent frogs currently underpins environmental flooding strategies in the Lowbidgee floodplain and Yanga National Park, the Murrumbidgee Water Sharing Plan and management of wetlands in the Mid Lachlan River. She has lead a number of major field based research projects on the relationship between flooding and amphibian dispersal, tadpole ecology, the relationship between native and introduced freshwater fish and amphibian recruitment during wetland flooding, temporal activity patterns of wetland dependant frogs and large scale drivers of amphibian habitat occupancy in regulated rivers and floodplain wetlands.

She is leader of the Murrumbidgee Long Term Intervention Monitoring Project

Research
  • Aquatic ecology
  • Ecology and conservation of wetland dependent amphibians
Publications
Full publications list on CRO

Recent Publications

  • Yoezer, D., Hall, A., Horta, A., & Wassens, S. (2026). Conservation status and threats to freshwater forested wetlands: A global systematic review. Biological Conservation, 315, 111704. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2026.111704
  • Toqeer, A., Hall, A., Horta, A., & Wassens, S. (Accepted/In press). A spatiotemporal machine learning framework to detect woody plant encroachment into hydrologically altered wetlands. In IEEE International Conference on Data Mining 2025 IEEE.
  • Wassens, S., Huntley, S., Bino, G., Hall, A., Pay, T., Talbot, S., Beard, A., Sundblom, C., Cardwell, N., & Turner, A. (2025). Biodiversity and habitat associations for mid-Murrumbidgee flow regulated creek systems 2023-24: Final technical report Work Order 18. Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder.
  • Wassens, S., Spencer, J., Heath, J., Kobayashi, T., Stocks, J., Mathwin, R., Talbot, S., Bino, G., Walcott, A., Cain, V., Francis, R., Gopalakrishnan, T., Grimmett, L., Prasad, K., & Hall, A. (2025). Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder Monitoring, Evaluation and Research program Murrumbidgee River system technical report, 2014-24. Commonwealth of Australia.
  • Turner, A., Heard, G., Mathwin, R., Bradshaw, C. J. A., Hall, A., & Wassens, S. (2025). Cool-season environmental water delivery increases extinction risk for chytrid-infected amphibians. Conservation Science and Practice, 7(5), 1-11. Article e70022. https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.70022