Dr Gary Poore (retired), Museum Victoria and Postdoc Rebecca Leaper, Tasmanian Aquaculture and Fisheries Institute

Gary Poore, Museum VictoriaHub researcher retires - Dr Gary Poore, Museum Victoria

A special issue of Memoirs of Museum Victoria has been dedicated to Dr Gary C B Poore on his retirement as Principal Curator of Marine Biology.

The Memoir is a tribute to Gary’s contributions to the field of crustacean systematics, with more than 100 taxonomic and ecological papers, over 350 new species described, and the building of Museum Victoria’s crustacean collection and systematics library. “The variety of crustacean taxa included —isopods, amphipods, cumaceans, carideans, stomatopods and thalassinideans, and the genera and species in the issue named in his honour – is a permanent reminder of Gary’s interests across diverse crustacean taxa.” said Memoir editors and colleagues Drs Joanne Taylor and Robin Wilson.

Read more about Gary’s work in the Cover and Contents Pages in the electronic version of the journal and download the individual papers http://www.museumvictoria.museum/about/books-and-journals/journals/memoi...

(Museum Victoria provides the hub with expertise in taxonomy of marine invertebrates that is critical for understanding the biodiversity, biogeography and evolution of Australia’s biota.)
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POSTDOC PROFILE

Rebecca Leaper, UTASRebecca Leaper, Tasmanian Aquaculture and Fisheries Institute
Hub Scientist - CERF Prediction Program

The famous scientist I share my birthday with struck a chord with me when he said, “in the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed”. A position with the CERF Marine Biodiversity Hub Prediction Program, which I began in March 2009, is my opportunity to collaborate and improvise effective ways to describe patterns of known biodiversity, to develop frameworks for accurately predicting ecological patterns and most importantly, to link biodiversity research to marine planners and managers.

I work with ecologists at the Tasmanian Aquaculture and Fisheries Institute and statisticians at CSIRO, applying the statistical models developed under the Prediction Program to an extensive continental-scale temperate reef biological dataset and associated physical and habitat surrogate data. We are currently describing both biodiversity structure (rank abundance distributions) and composition (species groups or archetypes) to reef assemblages in South Australia to support development of National Representative System for Marine Protected Areas (NRSMPA). This work is to be extended to temperate reef systems in other states and the most challenging and rewarding part of this work is the provision of tangible outputs to support ongoing management needs.

Since gaining my PhD at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland in 2000, I have worked as a quantitative ecologist with academic, non-governmental and public service groups in Australia and overseas. Projects included assessing the effects of an invading species on algal community structure and function in New Zealand; assessing and predicting the influence of climatic change on marine biodiversity in Britain and Ireland; and developing and critiquing marine ecosystem and food web models assessing the role of whales in the Southern Ocean and Pacific ecosystems. One of my career highlights was the opportunity to work at the science policy interface as a member of Australian Delegation to the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission.