Research Focus

Rebecca is a palaeoecologist based at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, and is interested in investigating how ecosystems respond to various drivers of change (notably climate, fire, and shifting landuse). She has worked in a range of tropical, sub-tropical, and temperate forest systems in south-east Asia (Sunda, Wallacea and the Philippine archipelago) and Australia to reconstruct environmental change over timescales ranging from decades to tens-of-thousands of years. She strives to contribute to the conservation of resilient socio-ecological systems in a changing world.

Curriculum Vitae

Rebecca currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena Germany. Her research forms of part of the ‘PANTROPOCENE’ research group, lead by Dr. Patrick Roberts, and focuses assessing the degree to which combined pre-colonial/ colonial disturbance impacted the structure and composition of tropical rainforest in the bounds of the former Spanish Empire.

In 2019, Rebecca was awarded the Merewether Fellowship at the State Library of NSW (Australia). This project – ‘Conservation mapping: a case study of Sydney’s 19th century water reserves’ – marries historical and palaeoecological data to determine the actual history of remnant freshwater wetlands within Sydney’s urban core that are protected on the basis of their representing the pre-European landscape.

Between 2017 and 2019, Rebecca worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Australian National University on an Australian Research Council funded project ‘The pace and rhythm of climate: 600,000 years in biological hotspot’ under CI A/Prof Janelle Stevenson. Her research focused on reconstructing the floristic and fire history of Sulawesi’s lowland tropical rainforest over a million years. This work presents the longest terrestrial record of forest-fire dynamics from insular south-east Asia, and, along with complimentary research stemming from the ICDP-funded Towuti Drilling Project (lead by J. Russell) reveals the response of the Indo-Pacific-Warm-Pool to global climate change.

Rebecca completed her Ph.D. in Geography at the University of Sydney 2017. Her thesis used palaeoenvironmental techniques to examine the long-term impact of climate and fire on the resilience of south-east Asian tropical monsoon forests over thousands of years.