Project topic areas

Our research focuses on the application of application of integrated socio-environmental approaches, along with spatially explicit modelling and remote sensing. Our current research areas include sustainable urban planning, natural resource management, extractive industries and biodiversity conservation. We have undertaken research across the world from China, Oceania to Southeast Asia and Europe and have a successful track record of applying landscape ecology methods to a broad range of cross-cutting areas with ongoing projects in the following areas: 1) modelling threats to the environment from infrastructure development and resource extraction using big environmental data and AI, 2) applications of Nature-based Solutions to  sustainability; and 3) supporting socio-environmental change with interdisciplinary approaches to modelling and collaborating across environmental domains and disciplines. 

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See Google Scholar for published research.

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Current Project - Mining Environmental and Social Challenges

Mining is one of the most consequential and least measured land-use pressures on Earth. The minerals that underpin decarbonisation, technological development, and global supply chains come at environmental and social costs that remain poorly quantified. Regulators, investors, and the communities who bear the burden of mine closure operate without the foundational data needed to hold the industry to account.

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Our research addresses this gap by combining remote sensing, deep learning, geographic information science, and spatial ecology to build the first scientifically rigorous, globally scalable framework for measuring mining's environmental footprint and its consequences. We work across the full chain from inventory to impact to liability, asking how much land mining disturbs globally, what ecological and environmental processes that disturbance disrupts, and what it will cost to restore.

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This work sits at the intersection of environmental monitoring, land system science, and the political economy of extractive industries, with direct relevance to critical minerals governance, just transitions, and corporate environmental accountability. Our outputs are designed to provide the empirical foundation that global mining governance currently lacks, and the tools to keep that foundation current as the industry evolves.

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• Mining spatial data intelligence for ecological and social risk assessment - Sister hub at Monash University Indonesia

Key Partners

• Professor Nisha Bao - NEU

• Associate Professor Risqi Saputra - Monash University, Indonesia (Lead at Monash University sister hub)

• Professor Deanna Kemp - University of Queensland

• Professor John Owen - University of Queensland

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Previous Project websites

• Policy and governance approaches to cooperative mitigation of peatland carbon emissions and transboundary haze in Southeast Asia - APN

• Enabling multispecies transitions - Research Council of Finland

• Resource Frontiers - Ford Foundation

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PhD and Postdoc Projects available

• Resources and mining systems and landscapes

• Spatial analysis, GIS, and remote sensing

• Data science and AI applications to sustainability

• Environmental risk and sustainability

• Nature-based Solutions, ecosystem services and human-nature interactions

• Energy transitions, critical minerals and sustainability

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