Keynote Speakers

 

Andrew Burbidge is a conservation biologist with many years of experience in island conservation and management, particularly in Western Australia.  He has surveyed a variety of island species, predominantly mammals and seabirds. His island management background includes the eradication of cats, goats, rabbits, rats and mice from islands, culminating in the eradication of black rats and feral cats from the Montebello Islands, a group of around 100 islands, islets and rocks of the Pilbara coast.  In recent years, he has been an adviser to the Western Australian government on island management, to the Commonwealth government on rabbit, rat and mouse eradication on Macquarie Island and biodiversity conservation on Christmas Island, and to Chevron Australia on the development of a quarantine management system for Barrow Island.

Bob Pressey is a professor at James Cook University, leading the newly established Program 6 (Conservation planning for a sustainable future) in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.  He is widely credited with establishing the important and emerging field of systematic conservation planning and he continues to be recognised internationally as one of its leading proponents and innovators.  His journal papers include some of the classic and most widely cited papers in his field.  His work has led a global shift towards translating the concepts and techniques of systematic conservation planning into actual conservation decisions on the ground. Since moving to JCU in late 2007, he has been developing project proposals on islands in the Great Barrier Reef.  One project concerns management costs, factors driving costs, and shortfalls between current and required enhanced costs.  Another focuses on identifying spatial priorities for investment in control of invasive species.

• Overall Winner and Winner of Outstanding Achievement by an Organisation in the Services Sector – Premier of Queensland’s SMART Awards 2004 
• Australian Institute of Management Medal for Management Innovation – 2004 Management Excellence Awards 
• National winner of the Technology, Communications, E-Commerce and Life Sciences category – 2005 Ernst and Young, Entrepreneur of the Year Awards 
• Winner of the Inspiration iAward and the Tourism & Hospitality category – AIIA iAwards 2006
• Winner of the “Most significant contribution by a large business or corporate” at the Vero Excellence in Business Support Awards 2007
• Three consecutive annual awards from Hitwise Internet intelligence service, announcing:
• Wotif.com as the #1 Travel – Destinations and Accommodation website across Australia for 2004 to 2007
• 2008 Suncorp Queenslander of the Year – the state’s highest citizenship honour, recognising individuals who have made a significant achievement in their chosen field and who have made a difference in their community.

Raymond Nias is the Director of Conservation, WWF Australia and is responsible for overall management of the WWF Australia Conservation Program.    Dr Nias has been actively involved for 20 years in the international work of WWF and was Chair of the WWF International Marine Advisory Group for 12 years.   He helped establish WWF’s presence in the South Pacific and played a key role in establishing the WWF Antarctic and Southern Ocean Program.   In 1990 he was commissioned by WWF International to prepare a program strategy for WWF in the South Pacific region with particular emphasis on community-based resource conservation.    Dr Nias has been involved in the development of numerous conservation programs policies and programs in Australia. He has been involved in topics ranging from illegal fishing on the high seas through to energy modelling in Australia. Dr Nias was a member of the Commonwealth’s Endangered Species Advisory Committee and its predecessor and has been involved in a number of recovery and threat abatement teams.   He has been a member of the CSIRO Biodiversity Sector Advisory Committee and was part of the CSIRO Energy Futures Forum.   He was a member of the 2002 Audit Biodiversity Assessment Advisory Committee that oversaw the preparation of the Australian Terrestrial Biodiversity Assessment 2002.   In 2007, Dr Nias chaired an international WWF Working Group that prepared a Global Programme Framework for WWF.   The purpose of the framework was to define the globally significant places, species and drivers that now shape the priorities for WWF’s global conservation program.

John Woinarski is a principal scientist with the Northern Territory's Department of Natural Resources Environment The Arts and Sport, and an adjunct professorial fellow at the School for Environmental Research, Charles Darwin University.  He has worked on a very wide range of biodiversity conservation issues in northern Australia for the last 20 years, with this work recognised with awards of a Eureka Prize for biodiversity research (2001), Serventy Prize for life-time contribution to ornithology (2001), Northern Territory Tropical Knowledge Research and Innovation Award (2008) and the Northern Territory's Chief Minister's Prize for Research and Innovation (2008).  Islands fascinate me; and I have sampled plants, ants, frogs, reptiles, birds and/or mammals at about 100 islands in the Northern Territory.  Beyond this fascination with the distributional patterns evident in these studies, I have worked extensively at managing the conservation values of these islands, in collaboration with the islands' Indigenous landowners.