Dr Melissa Dobbie, CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences

Dr Melissa Dobbie: monitoring landscape-scale ecosystems

Dr Melissa Dobbie develops and applies statistical methods to solve challenging environmental problems, with an emphasis on water quality monitoring.

• 16 October 2007 | Updated 14 October 2011

• Current activities 
• Background
• Academic qualifications
• Achievements

Current activities

Dr Melissa Dobbie is an environmental statistician with CSIRO who collaborates with researchers on design and analysis of ecological and landscape-scale monitoring studies. 

Her work is focused on developing and applying statistical methods to solve environmental and ecological problems.

Design of environmental monitoring programs with an emphasis on monitoring ecosystem health is Dr Dobbie's particular interest. 

Dr Dobbie provides statistical expertise in all facets of monitoring, but particularly on designing large-scale monitoring studies and on spatio-temporal trend analysis.

Dr Dobbie is currently helping to redesign the whole of Queensland’s ambient freshwater stream and estuarine monitoring program. 

The Stream and Estuary Assessment Program is being undertaken by the Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Water in conjunction with the Queensland Environmental Protection Agency.

This project aims to provide a more complete picture of ecosystem health by assessing the effects on the ecosystem caused by land use, water extraction, urbanisation and recreation and tourism, within a statistically valid and defensible monitoring framework.

Background

Dr Dobbie joined CSIRO in 1995 as a biometrician and has been working as an environmental statistician since 2002. 

During her time with CSIRO she has collaborated with multidisciplinary teams on design and analysis of biological, agricultural and environmental experiments and studies.

After completing her doctorate, Dr Dobbie spent a year lecturing and conducting research as part of a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

She recalls this as a fantastic opportunity to hone her research skills further and to network with other statisticians.

'Statistics is a profession that does not exist on its own. Statistics and statistical reasoning are essential ingredients in solving most scientific problems – the glue that binds the science together - and that makes the profession of a statistician a very powerful one,' says Dr Dobbie.

Academic qualifications

Dr Dobbie has been awarded a:

• Bachelor of Science with First Class Honours from The University of Queensland, in 1993
• Doctor of Philosophy in Mathematical Statistics from the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, in 2001.

Her doctoral thesis was titled Modelling correlated zero-inflated count data.

Achievements

Dr Dobbie has received the 2007 AusCan Scholarship by the Statistical Societies of Australia and Canada, to visit Canada in late 2007.

Dr Dobbie is also a member of the following professional societies:

• Statistical Society of Australia Inc
• The International Environmetrics Society
• International Biometric Society (Currently serving as President of the Australasian Region)
• The International Society for Environmental Information Sciences.

Read more about CSIRO's work in Environmental modelling and monitoring: strength in numbers.