Dr Jose Rafael Ferrer Paris

My Expertise

I am a member of the Commission on Ecosystem Management of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

I have been working in the Red List of Ecosystem Thematic Group since 2017, and contribute to two knowledge products of international relevance: the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems and the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology.

I have conducted and contributed to several assessments of conservation status of ecosystems in Latin America, Asia and Australia.

Keywords

iucn red list of ecosystems

geospatial analysis

ecological monitoring

Fields of Research (FoR)

Ecology, Landscape ecology, Conservation and biodiversity

SEO tags

Protected Conservation Areas in Fresh, Ground and Surface Water Environments

Protected Conservation Areas in Marine Environments

Flora, Fauna and Biodiversity at Regional or Larger Scales

Ecosystem Assessment and Management of Forest and Woodlands Environments

Ecosystem Assessment and Management of Coastal and Estuarine Environments

Biography

I develop methods and frameworks to inform ecosystem science and the conservation of biological diversity. My research is influencing global and national policy on ecosystem conservation and management.

My research projects apply spatial ecology and biodiversity informatics methods to organise, access, visualise and analyse a broad range of ecological data like species distribution records, camera trap detection histories, species interactions, species traits or spatio-temporal indicators of ecosystem function. Such data feed digital knowledge bases that are fundamental for policy and management decisions. They inform ecological research, policy, risk management for threatened ecosystems and species, ecosystem restoration and conservation, and natural capital accounting.

Reproducibility and transparency of my research is critical for building trust among different user groups supporting evidence-based decisions, driving me to provide open access to data and workflows and encourage reusability and external validation of methods and results. Alongside my peer-reviewed publications, I share my code in and make regular digital contributions to data repositories and knowledge portals.

My career took me to Germany, Venezuela and South Africa before I arrived at UNSW in 2019.

My Research Activities

Since my appointment at UNSW I have co-developed the Global Ecosystem Typology as a new function-based approach to understand and classify all terrestrial, freshwater, marine and subterranean ecosystems on Earth.

This typology is having significant impact on policy and practice of conservation around the world, including for identifying representativeness of current ecosystems in reserves to natural capital accounting.
Application of this framework helps to understand changes in the distribution and condition of ecosystems that are essential for conservation of ecosystem services and nature's contribution to human wellbeing.
My research is leading to collaborations with international research and practitioner networks leading development of ecosystem specific indicators and analytical methods. These indicators support risk assessments of ecosystems, condition measurement and quantitative synthesis of ecosystem data to inform national and global reporting on conservation and sustainable development.

In my current position I aim to improve ecosystem management and restoration capacity by applying these frameworks in an Australian context to track biodiversity outcomes effectively. This work spans terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems across landscapes managed by public, private and indigenous organisations in New South Wales.

I am also working on management of threats to ecosystems. Bush fire regimes have proved to be a critical aspect of terrestrial ecosystem management in recent years, yet the knowledge base is fragmented and dispersed with limited accessibility to fire managers and researchers. To address this problem, I am leading the development of a Fire ecology traits database for plants, which will synthesize existing knowledge on the diversity of the responses of plant species to fires events. This new digital platform is founded on plant demographic processes and links spatiotemporally explicit observations on plant response to fire events and environmental conditions. The database will improve capacity to predict how fire regimes structure plant communities and inform fire management strategies for biodiversity conservation.

My Research Supervision

Supervision keywords

red list of ecosystems

spatial ecology

spatial statistical model

biostatistics

ecological and environmental phenomena

ecological niche model

ecological monitoring

biodiversity & conservation

Areas of supervision

PhD Project Opportunities – Ecosystem Science (2 PhDs)

The research team at UNSW Centre for Ecosystem Science in Sydney will deliver state-of the-art ecosystem data streams, advanced skills capacity and ground-breaking thematic risk assessments. These Australian innovations for ecosystem conservation will influence nature-positive agendas worldwide. We are looking for two candidates that want to help in the translation of ecosystem-specific knowledge and environmental monitoring data into informative fit-for-purpose indicators of ecosystem distributions, status and trends.

Ecosystems, vital to biodiversity and human wellbeing, are undergoing accelerated degradation. An ARC Industry Laureate Fellowship led by Professor David Keith will equip Australia with rigorous scientific foundations for leading the nature positive ecosystem conservation agenda that supports national strategies for ecosystem protection, management and restoration.

We are offering two PhD projects for highly motivated candidates:

Mapping challenge: Ecosystems in arid and semi-arid Australia are poorly mapped. Sparse field samples combined with long-term and landscape level dynamics hamper our ability to accurately map complex spatio-temporal mosaics of ecosystem types. This PhD will focus on innovative modelling of ecosystem spatial patterns and dynamics based on remote sensing and other spatio-temporal data to reveal the hidden patterns in our deserts and semi-deserts.
Drivers and trends in ecosystem collapse: Threats like climate change, disrupted fire regimes and invasive species are driving widespread environmental degradation but we lack adequate means to measure and compare in the responses of different ecosystem types. This PhD project will focus on the translation of ecosystem-specific knowledge and environmental monitoring data streams into informative fit-for-purpose indicators of ecosystem status and trends.

These projects offer a unique opportunity to gain skills and contribute to a research team addressing a key issue of national and global significance in conservation science.

Other projects

I am available to supervise students interested in the following topics:

Conceptual models of ecosystem types
Maps of ecosystem extent
Connectivity and dynamic of ecosystem processes
Spatial and temporal analysis of ecosystem condition
Modelling and diagnosing risk of ecosystem collapse
Maps of drivers, stresses and threats to species and ecosystems

My Teaching

I am a champion of open and reproducible research, so most of my contributions are related to helping other improve their coding and data management skills.

I contribute to skills seminars in the Centre of Ecosystem Science, to the Drop-In help sessions and workshops of the UNSW codeRs group, and help at Restech Drop-In sessions.

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