Brooke focused on conservation in the context of fire management. In her honours project she was looking at the trade-off between the conflicting management goals of prescribed burns for asset protection and burns for conservation of fire dependent ecosystems. Her goal was to develop and apply new spatial optimisation methods to assist environmental managers to allocate limited funds to fire management in the context of competing objectives.

The Honours project was part of a larger research collaboration with City of Gold Coast. It was supervised by Kerrie Wilson and Luke Shoo.

Brooke began her Bachelor of Science in 2011 with a passion for animals and nature. Through various volunteering opportunities and field trips presented though UQ, she quickly fell in love with the amazing landscapes she was exposed to and was drawn to ecology and conservation subjects. After graduating Brooke travelled for two years through various countries, with most of her time spent in Central America and Europe. She was a part of various volunteering opportunities, the most notable being her time spent at the Iracambi Research Center in Brazil. Her duties included tree planting for restoration, soil sampling, water sampling, setting up camera traps, general reserve maintenance such as trail clearing and step building. The ex-agricultural land turned into research centre/conservation reserve was surrounded by agricultural land and so Brooke was able to see first-hand the conflicts that exist between conservation and local landowners. There sparked her interest in research achieving conservation targets within a sometimes difficult social framework.

Honours student, University of Queensland

Brooke was the recipient of a South East Queensland Fire and Biodiversity Consortium Research Scholarship, for news updates visit http://www.fireandbiodiversity.org.au/news.html.

Qualifications 

Bachelor of Science, University of Queensland, 2011-2013

Themes and Projects

City of Gold Coast project

Publications

Williams, B. A., Shoo, L. P., Wilson, K. A. and Beyer, H. L. (2017), Optimizing the spatial planning of prescribed burns to achieve multiple objectives in a fire-dependent ecosystem. Journal of Applied Ecology. Accepted Author Manuscript. doi:10.1111/1365-2664.12920

Research brief

Williams, B. A., Shoo, L. P., Wilson, K. A. and Beyer, H. L. (2017) Fire management for asset protection and the environment. Research Brief. ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions