Dr Maria Beger

I am a conservation ecologist with complementary interests in coral reef ecology and spatial conservation prioritization. I mostly work in the Coral Triangle, the Pacific, the Western Indian Ocean, Japan and Australia.  I also work in projects dealing with fish biomass predictions, climate change science, ecosystem services, and global evaluations of protected areas. Current themes I work on are:

•     Integrating larval dispersal into spatial planning and conservation;
•     How can genetic data inform conservation decisions?
•     Managing whole life cycles in migratory animals: integrating telemetry into planning;
•     How can we model and manage coral reef resilience?
•     Multi-taxon community assembly rules along a tropical to temperate temperature gradient (Australia, Japan)
•     Managing range shifts;
•     How do pristine reefs differ (Republic of the Marshall Islands)?
•     Develop coastal and offshore bioregionalisations (South Pacific);
•     Quantifying human-ecological links in coastal ecosystems;
•     Which fish are here (fish species counts in Maldives, Philippines, Indonesia, PNG, Australia, Palau, FSM, Marshall Islands, ...)

I collaborate with local and regional conservation NGOs, including The Nature Conservancy (Coral Triangle, Micronesia), IUCN (Pacific, Maldives), World Wildlife Fund (Malaysia), Marshall Islands Conservation Society (Republic of the Marshall Islands). I also work with government agencies, such as the NSW Department of Primary Industries and NSW Office of Environment and Heritage in Australia.