University of Tasmania, Australia

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Sam Wood

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Dr Sam Wood

Post Doctoral

BSc (Hons)

Sam Wod

Contact Details

Contact Campus Sandy Bay Campus
Building Life Sciences Building
Room Reference 272
Telephone +61 3 6226 1944
Fax +61 3 6226 2698
Email swwood@utas.edu.au

Publications

  • Wood, S.W. and Bowman, D.M.J.S., 2011, 'Alternative stable states and the role of fire-vegetation-soil feedbacks in the temperate wilderness of southwest Tasmania.', Landscape Ecology, DOI 10.1007/s10980-011-9677-0
  • Wood, S.W., Murphy, B.P. and Bowman, D.M.J.S., 2011, 'Firescape ecology: how topography determines the contrasting distribution of fire and rain forest in the south west of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area.', Journal of Biogeography, 38, 1807-1820
  • Wood, S.W., Hua, Q. and Bowman, D.M.J.S., 2011, 'Fire-patterned vegetation and the development of organic soils in the lowland vegetation mosaics of south-west Tasmania.', Australian Journal of Botany, 59, 126-136
  • Bowman, D.M.J.S. and Wood, S.W., 2009, 'Fire driven land cover change in Australia and W.D. Jackson's theory of the fire ecology of southwest Tasmania. ', Fire and Tropical Ecosystems (ed. by M.A. Cochrane), 87-106, Springer, New York
  • Roxburgh, S.H., Wood, S.W., Mackey, B.G., Woldendorp, G. and Gibbons, P, 2006, 'Assessing the carbon sequestration potential of managed forests: a case study from temperate Australia.', Journal of Applied Ecology, 43, 1149-1159.
  • Wood, S.W., Hua, Q. and Bowman, D.M.J.S. , 2010, 'Age and growth of a fire prone Tasmanian temperate old-growth forest stand dominated by Eucalyptus regnans, the world’s tallest angiosperm.', Forest Ecology and Management, 260, 438-447

Achievements

In 2001 completed a BSc in Resource an Environmental Management at the Australian National University that included an honours project that investigated the carbon dynamics of the tall eucalypt forests of the NSW South Coast (with the CRC Greenhouse Accounting). I spent the next four years as a researcher for Forests NSW working throughout the State on a range of projects related to carbon accounting, mine-site rehabilitation and tree water use.

In 2011 I completed a PhD (UTAS) that investigated the efficacy of the Alternative Stables States paradigm for the vegetation communities of southwest Tasmania. This landscape ecology project used novel historical ecology techniques such as dendro-ecology, stable carbon isotopes, repeat aerial photography and geospatial statistics to shed light on the vegetation dynamics of moorland-eucalypt-rainforest mosaics.

I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Environmental Change Biology lab at the University of Tasmania. I am coordinating the design and implementation of a forest monitoring plot network (Ausplots-Forests) under the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN). I am also working on an ARC funded project that is using tree rings from Tasmanian endemic conifers (King Billy Pine and Pencil Pine) to characterise past fire regimes in Tasmania.

Research Interests

As a landscape ecologist I am interested in combining historical data with spatial data to untangle the complex interactions between fire, vegetation and soils that shape Australian vegetation communities. I am acutely aware of the need for temporal proxies to help ecologists understand the impact of environmental change on forest ecosystems. Therefore I am particularly interested in establishing long-term monitoring systems and developing dendo-ecological techniques to better understand past fire regimes.

Research Areas

Research Project/s