Overview

• Current activities
• Background
• Academic qualifications
• Achievements
• Prospective Students

Current activities

Dr Peterson is a spatial ecologist working on a variety of projects relating to freshwater monitoring and modelling, primarily within the CSIRO Water for a Healthy Country Flagship.

Her background and experience allow her to work at the interface of:

• geographic information science
• aquatic ecology
• landscape ecology
• environmental statistics

This research area provides a rich set of modelling and analysis challenges to work on, related to capturing and quantifying spatio-temporal heterogeneity at multiple scales within a statistical modelling framework.

Dr Peterson is also committed to software tool development, which helps to ensure that the methodologies she develops are made accessible to ecologists and natural resource managers. This allows users to implement, modify, and improve on her methods to derive additional information about pattern and process in aquatic and terrestrial landscapes.

Dr Peterson's current research activities include:

• Spatial Tools for the Analysis of River Systems: the STARS ArcGIS toolset and the SSN package [external link] for R statistical software
• Great Northern LCC Regional Stream Temperature Database and Modelling Project [external link]
• CSIRO Ecological Responses to Altered Flow Regimes Collaboration Cluster
• Accounting for uncertainty in pollutant load estimation for the Great Barrier Reef catchments

Background

Dr Peterson joined CSIRO in 2005 as a postdoctoral research fellow. Since 2008, she has been working as a Research Scientist in the Environmental and Agricultural Informatics Research Program. During this time, her research has primarily focused on landscape-scale freshwater monitoring and modelling, within both an Australian and international context.

Academic qualifications

Dr Peterson has been awarded the following degrees:

• Bachelor of Science in Forest Conservation from Michigan State University (USA), 1995
• Master of Science in Forest Sciences from Colorado State University, 2001
• Doctor of Philosophy in Earth Resources from Colorado State University, 2005.

Prospective Students

Dr Peterson co-supervises a small number of Honours, Masters and PhD students. In addition, there may be opportunities for summer Vacation Scholarships for undergraduate students.

Prospective candidates can contact Dr Peterson to discuss potential research projects.

Read more about our work Monitoring water quality in South-East Queensland.