Mick Ashcroft Position:   PhD student Email:   mba97@uow.edu.au Lab/other loc:   Spatial Analysis Laboratory (SAL) Lab Phone:   4221 5693

Supervisors:

Dr Laurie Chisholm (GeoQuEST Research Centre, School of Earth & Environmental Sciences)

Assoc. Prof. Kris French (Institute of Conservation Biology, School of Biological Sciences).

PhD Title:

"The spatial variation of environmental factors on the Illawarra Escarpment and their influence on vegetation patterns"

Research Interests

- Explaining and predicting the distribution of species, with particular focus on trees and invertebrates

- Predicting the impacts of climate change at a scale that is relevant to land managers

- Improving the accuracy of environmental predictors that are used in Species Distribution Models, including temperature, moisture, nutrients, bushfire hazard and disturbance.

- Explaining the spatial and temporal variability of invertebrate communities

Representative Publications

Ashcroft, M.B., Chisholm, L.A. & French, K.O. (2009) Climate change at the landscape scale: predicting fine-grained spatial heterogeneity in warming and potential refugia for vegetation. Global Change Biology, 15: 656-667.

Gollan, J.R., Ashcroft, M.B., Cassis, G., Donnelly, A.P. & Lassau, S.A. (2009) Testing common habitat-based surrogates of invertebrate diversity in a semi-arid rangeland. Biodiversity and Conservation, in press.

Ashcroft, M.B., Chisholm, L.A. & French, K.O. (2008) The effect of exposure on landscape scale soil surface temperatures and species distribution models. Landscape Ecology, 23: 211-225.

Ashcroft M.B. (2006) A method for improving landscape scale temperature predictions and the implications for vegetation modelling. Ecological Modelling 197: 394-404.

Abbreviated CV

2003 – MEnvSci, University of Wollongong
1993 – BMath/BE(Elec), University of Wollongong