Cassandra James

Cassie James is a senior research officer and vegetation ecologist with the Centre for Tropical Water and Aquatic Ecosystem Research (TropWATER) at James Cook University in Townsville. Dr James research encompasses the ecology and management of riparian, floodplain and wetland vegetation. Cassie has also worked on the impacts of climate change on the biodiversity of freshwater biota.

She has collaborated on several monitoring and evaluation projects across the Great Barrier reef catchment area and, more broadly, across Queensland and New South Wales. Cassie has worked on a diverse array of projects and contract research for industry and government to monitor and manage the influences of mining, agriculture and urban activities on aquatic ecosystems. Cassie couples strong field skills with expertise in compiling and manipulating large ecological datasets for analysis and visualization including the use of GIS and high performance computing. She specializes in the handling of "big data", the development of QA/QC protocols to asses the quality of data and the analysis, presentation and archiving of water quality data. Cassie has led several TropWATER projects and regularly coordinates across multi-disciplinary research teams.