DrGalen Holt

Species respond to their environment in an amazing variety of ways, and those responses are often what draw us in as both scientists and observers of the natural world. I seek to better understand how this diversity of responses play out among interacting species and across large, variable landscapes to produce biodiversity as an emergent property. My research sits at the intersection of coexistence theory, spatio-temporal modelling, and empirical aquatic ecology, and I apply this expertise to develop process-based models for conservation and water management.

Biodiversity is being lost at an accelerating rate, largely through human pressures such as climate change and the loss of habitat and connectivity. To mitigate those losses, we first have to understand what maintains diversity in the first place. Investigating those processes reveals how ecological communities work, and in turn how to build more rigorous conservation and management strategies.

My own contribution has been to develop theory and models for how species respond to variable and non-stationary environments, including relationships between environmental variation, dispersal, and the strength of coexistence, and expected trajectories and range shifts using new 'asymptotic environmentally determined trajectory' (aedt) theory for populations under climate change. This work provides the foundation for my open-source process-based models now used in Murray-Darling Basin management. Combining theory, modelling, and fieldwork lets me connect a fundamental understanding of dynamics to real communities and to decisions about environmental water and climate adaptation.

Two current directions of my work are:

1. Extending and applying theory for population trajectories under climate change to complex landscapes and real communities. Rather than assuming species settle into a 'new normal', this treats a population as following a continually shifting trajectory as it chases changing conditions.
2. Building more robust process-based models for environmental water management that better capture the biological consequences of altered flow regimes and improve forecasting under an uncertain future.