Nicholas Murray

About

Dr Nicholas Murray is Associate Professor in Global Ecology and Conservation at James Cook University. Nick is based in the Marine Biology and Aquaculture group.

Nick's research focuses on delivering the science necessary to inform local-to-global scale environmental management and conservation. He works the interface of ecology, geospatial science and geography, and has ongoing research projects focused around quantifying change in ecosystems and wildlife populations. He has published extensively in the scientific literature on ecosystem dynamics, earth observation, global change, migration ecology and conservation science. Nick travels far and wide to study Earth's changing environments and has a number of projects working on several of the world's most remote ecosystems.

Nick's work has been recognised with awards including the Eureka Prize (as part of a global conservation team), the IUCN Commission on Ecosystem Management, and the Australian Academy of Science ASPIRE Prize for innovation. He is an active member of the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems global team and serves as an Associate Editor for Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation and Remote Sensing.

Nick's lab website (http://www.globalecologylab.org) reports recent news, publications, and open-source datasets and software developed in our group. You can also read profiles on Nick's research in Nature (Ecology's remote-sensing revolution) and Science (Mud on the move).

Lab

Nick leads the Global Ecology Lab at JCU. We are an energetic lab group set on delivering the research needed to support the conservation of species and ecosystems at local to global scales. We work at the interface of ecology, remote sensing and conservation biology, and have ongoing research projects focused around ecosystem dynamics and species conservation in terrestrial and marine environments worldwide. For more on our research and activities, please visit the Global Ecology Lab website: www.globalecologylab.org

Opportunities

Postdocs

We currently have no open post-doctoral positions available. If you wish to apply for a competitive research fellowship, such as an ARC DECRA Fellowship, please contact Nick to discuss opportunities for developing this type of fellowship within our group at JCU.

Research assistants

We regularly have casual positions for research assistants to support our global ecosystem remote sensing projects. These positions work closely with the lab group to develop training and validation datasets to support our high-resolution global-scale projects aimed at mapping threatened ecosystems and how they change over time. If you are interested in a research assistant position or placement in our lab, please contact Nick regarding current opportunities.

Prospective students

We have a range of ongoing opportunities to conduct graduate research in our lab. We typically focus on recruiting post-graduate students keen to focus on applied remote sensing, estimating risks to threatened marine, coastal and terrestrial ecosystems, species movement and migration, and status assessments of biodiversity.

Some brief potential projects that would be suitable to develop in our lab include:

• Quantitative methods in ecosystem distribution mapping.
• The use of remote sensing for ecosystem risk assessment.
• The changing drivers of coastal ecosystem change and new opportunities for conservation.
• Advancing global-scale remote sensing to meet conservation needs.
• Detecting ecosystem degradation from space.
• Global barriers of tidal inundation.
• Fine-scale detection of coastal wetland change in South-east Asia.
• Developing new performance measures of nature-based coastal defenses.
• Forecasting coastal change: connecting spatial simulations to earth observation.

We also welcome your own ideas for your PhD project. If you are interested in conducting honours, masters or PhD research in our lab, contact Nick with a CV and statement of research interests.

Currently, Nick is the subject coordinator and developer of the 'Marine Data Science' subject for the Masters of Marine Biology program, which aims to teach masters-level students how to apply quantitative tools to better understand marine environments from the micro to the macro scale. The subject includes modules on data science, environmental computing, remote sensing, spatial analysis, 3D photogrammetry and systematic conservation planning.