Megan McNellie
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About
I am an Honorary Senior Lecturer, I completed my PhD as an external and part-time scholar at Fenner School of Environment & Society. I am currently employed as a Research Scientist with New South Wales Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. My research delivers predictive and inferential models to protect biodiversity and make better conservation policy and decision making.
My PhD delivered spatially explicit models of vegetation condition over broad scales. I undertook this research in collaboration with CSIRO and the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (Victoria) and NSW Department of Planning, Infrastructure and Environment.
My experience and skill base in enriching plot data to support site-scaled assessments of vegetation condition, blending bioinformatics and ecological modelling to support biodiversity policy are the areas where I will extend my future research.
Affiliations
Research interests
THESIS TITLE
Predicting spatial patterns in vegetation across landscapes: from structure and composition to condition and change.
THESIS DESCRIPTION
Mapping change and trends in the state of vegetation can be used to gauge where and how much of the landscape has been modified. This information can be used to support evidence-based decisions for conservation and land management. However, mapping change can be challenging because quantities long-term, site-based data are limited; vegetation communities can be structurally and compositionally complex; defining reference states from which to measure change is context-dependent and different vegetation attributes respond differently to disturbance.
This research aims to address these challenges. We propose that archived site-based floristic data (n = 7234) can be assimilated into discrete structural or compositional components for different plant growth forms (trees, shrubs, grass and grass-like, forbs, ferns and remaining ‘others’). With this information we will explore patterns in structural complexity and composition of plant growth forms and assess change relative to their empirical benchmarks.
The outcomes of this research will support conservation practitioners, planners and policy makers to make informed decisions and contributes to the New South Wales government policy in the ‘NSW Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016 No 63 Part 6 Division 2 - Biodiversity assessment method’ (https://www.legislation.nsw.gov.au/#/view/act/2016/63/part6/div2)