Dr Simon Barry, monitoring and modelling our landscape.

Dr Simon Barry: helping to further our understanding of environmental resources

Dr Simon Barry uses his expertise in modelling and monitoring methodologies to lead research projects with the aim of helping environmental resource managers and stakeholders understand what resources we have, their quality and how to manage them for sustainability.

8 January 2008 | Updated 14 October 2011

Current activities
Background
Academic qualifications
Achievements

Current activities

Dr Barry is Program Leader of Environmental Informatics, a research program of CSIRO Mathematics, Informatics and Statistics.

Research in this area focuses on obtaining valuable information from environmental resources data by using sophisticated modelling and monitoring methodologies.

The research also helps to ensure that data collected in the future will be of maximum usefulness to natural resource managers.

The statistical research has two major focuses:

developing statistical design and modelling technologies to enable monitoring, forecasting and management of environmental resources demand, supply and quality (including ecosystem health)
informing environmental policy and management strategies through the design of surveys and sampling schemes and building statistical models to examine status, trends and patterns.

Background

Dr Barry joined CSIRO in 2007 with a background in statistics and modelling in the natural resources sector.

Dr Barry was previously a senior principal scientist with the Bureau of Rural Sciences (BRS), the scientific bureau within the Australian Government’s Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.

There he led a team of quantitative scientists working on biosecurity, fisheries and natural resource management issues.

Academic qualifications

Dr Barry has been awarded a:

Bachelor of Science with First Class Honours in Statistics from Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia
Doctorate in Biostatistics, also at the Australian National University.
Research in Dr Barry's area focuses on obtaining valuable information from environmental resources data by using sophisticated modelling and monitoring methodologies.

His areas of study included:

botany
genetics
ecology
statistics
biochemistry
computing
mathematics.

Achievements

Dr Barry's doctoral thesis, titled The regression analysis of group truncated data, won the Australian National University 1999 PAP Moran Prize for an outstanding Doctorate leading to the advancement of knowledge in Probability and Mathematical Statistics.

During his time with the BRS, Dr Barry was involved with two high profile projects that were awarded the Alison Furbank Award for Communication Excellence, an award made for excellence and effectiveness of communication through a project:

the 2004 winner, The Interactive Social Atlas, uses the information from the latest ABS Population and Housing Census data to focus on the people and communities of non-metropolitan Australia. The Interactive Social Atlas allows users to create and download customised social atlas products for any region in Australia, by selecting a region of interest and all or some of the social data information they may require.
the 2005 winner was the Meat and Livestock Australia Rainfall to Pasture Growth Outlook Tool, a web based resource that estimates pasture growth in relation to rainfall, soil moisture and other climatic conditions in southern Australia. It was developed by the Bureau of Rural Services on behalf of Meat and Livestock Australia.

Dr Barry was also the:

invited lead author for the Cross cutting issues and uncertainty Chapter in the 2003 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Good Practice Guidance for Landuse, Landuse change and Forestry
invited speaker at the 55th International Statistical Institute conference in April 2005 in Sydney, NSW, Australia, presenting a paper entitled Dirichlet modelling of Fish age data.

Learn more about CSIRO’s work in Environmental informatics: strength in numbers.