Dr Sébastien Lamontagne – lured into science by a love of nature

A love of nature lured Dr Sébastien Lamontagne into a career in environmental sciences.

The keen flyfisher, surfer and camper also has a philosophy of learning his trade by working on different problems, which led him to Australia and the CSIRO in 2000 from his French Canadian home of Quebec.

"I thought it was a great opportunity to look at different problems in a new environment," he says. "I have not been disappointed."

Now an Australian citizen, Sébastien leads the Water for a Healthy Country Flagship's program of the Coorong, Lower Lakes and Murray Mouth (CLLAMM).

Canada's Experimental Lakes Area was Sébastien's first scientific laboratory, offering the capacity to undertake research at a large scale.

"My specialty is to look at the way nature works at a bigger scale, such as the drainage basin of lakes, rather than at the bench," he says.

"The current emphasis of my work is on the management of environmental flows and salinity in the Lower Murray, including the CLLAMM region."

Sébastien believes the CLLAMM research is vitally important due to the national and international significance of the location.

"We have international obligations to maintain the health of the region under Ramsar and other agreements," he says.

"If a relatively wealthy country like Australia can't maintain key environment assets such as the Coorong, it will be hard for us to get other countries to do the same."

But he admits that this part of the Murray-Darling Basin is going to be one of the most difficult to save because it is at the end of the system, is relatively large, and has high water requirements.

"We hope to define better the environmental water requirements for the region. While assessments have been done in the past, they used tools designed for the river and not so much for the estuary," he says.

"We need to better define the options to maintain some level of ecosystem health in the region."

In addition to the CLLAMM project, Sébastien leads a project studying the cycles of salt and sulphur in saline floodplains of the Lower Murray. He is also working with CSIRO colleague Dr Peter Cook on the use of environmental tracers to measure water movement between streams and groundwater.

"While the problems I work on are very different now, some of the basic principles to approach them are the same. For example, the chemistry of acid rain I studied while back in Canada is very similar to the one of sulfur cycling in saline floodplains."

Project profile Coorong, Lower Lakes and Murray Mouth.

Contact: Sebastien Lamontage, Water for a Healthy Country Flagship










 

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