About

Don is a research ecologist, consultant and keen field naturalist based on the Atherton Tablelands, formerly based in Darwin, with particular interests in plants, vegetation and birds.  He is an author of four books, twelve book chapters, and over 120 peer-reviewed papers and numerous popular science articles. He is, or has been, a subject editor for the journals Biodiversity & Conservation, Biotropica and Corella and production editor for the Northern Territory Naturalist, and for many years edited the newsletter Nature Territory.

Peter Valentine is an Adjunct Professor at James Cook University. He worked mainly on conservation including protected area management when he was full time academic at the University and his research included biogeography and conservation of Australian butterflies amongst other areas. He has worked across the world and was Editor of the IUCN Best Practice Guidelines Series for the World Commission on Protected Areas for many years. While at James Cook University he was Head of the School of Tropical Environment Studies and Geography and also Head of the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences. He was an assessor for the Australian Research Council grants program and a referee for many journals both Australian and International. He has also been an examiner for PhD theses for several Australian Universities. His peer-reviewed publications number >100 and he was Chair of the Wet Tropics Management Authority until recently and a Director of Terrain NRM for 8 years. He is currently President of the Tree Kangaroo and Mammal Group and is Conservation Officer for Birdlife Northern Queensland.

Gay Crowley is an ecologist with over 30 years’ experience in research and extension aimed at improving environmental management. Her research interests span conservation ecology; biogeography; fire and biodiversity management; and Natural Resource Management planning. She has published extensively on the habitat and food requirements of threatened birds. Her current work involves combining legacy datasets with modern analytical techniques to understand the decline and recovery of the Endangered Golden-shouldered Parrot. She is a Vincent Serventy medallist, recognising her services to ornithology. She has been a handling editor for North Queensland Naturalist since 2017. Gay has authored or co-authored over 100 books, reports, plans, chapters, and peer-reviewed publications.

Miriam Goosem is an environmental scientist and ecologist who currently divides her time between Cairns and the Atherton Tablelands, Far North Queensland. She has been involved in research at James Cook University for more than 27 years. She also taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses for more than 10 years in Environmental Impact Assessment and the Mitigation of Human Impacts in Protected Areas. Miriam is recognised globally for her expertise in research regarding the impacts of roads and powerlines on rainforest and other tropical environments, having been invited to present at many international conferences on this subject. She has researched such diverse road impacts as wildlife mortality on roads, edge changes in species composition of plants, birds and small mammals, edge changes in microclimate, weed and pest invasions along roads, and noise and headlight penetration into forest areas. Her research into the mitigation of road impacts has demonstrated the viability of engineering options for improving connectivity for rainforest wildlife, including terrestrial and arboreal mammals. However she recognises that the best option for reducing the impacts of roads is for highways and secondary roads to avoid roadless areas, presenting seminars and teaching in developing countries about how best to reduce the impacts of roads whilst still allowing economic development. She has also prepared Best Practice Guidelines for roads in rainforest habitats. Miriam’s other major research interest focusses on connectivity in fragmented landscapes. She has investigated habitat quality in fragmented rainforest regions. Recently she has collaborated in projects aimed at reducing fragmentation and increasing biodiversity and carbon storage by enhancing naturally regenerating forests. 

Eric Vanderduys grew up in a few locations in southern and eastern Australia. He could never decide what was more interesting out of fish, reptiles, plants, birds or mammals. Then there's spiders and butterflies – it gets difficult to keep up. He saw a gap in the literature on the frog fauna of Queensland, which has more species of frogs than any other Australian state, and wrote Field Guide to the Frogs of Queensland, published in 2012. He worked on and off in northern Australia from 1995 onwards, before moving to north Queensland in 2003, where he took up a position as a field ecologist with the (then) Qld Environmental Protection Agency. In 2006 he moved across to CSIRO, still working as a field ecologist on a variety of landscape scale projects – mostly regarding the effects of fire, clearing, grazing and weeds on terrestrial vertebrates. Eric has published on reptiles, including describing new species from north Queensland (and there's more to come), amphibians, vertebrate ecology and mixed bird flocks. He orchestrated the rediscovery of the "extinct" lizard Lerista allanae from central Queensland in 2009. He has been a member of the Black-throated Finch Recovery Team since 2006, written about the endangered southern Blackthroated Finch, and maintains a database of records of this subspecies. He currently spends a lot of time catching and monitoring flying foxes, and trying to understand the ecology of feral pigs on Cape York Peninsula. He has reviewed papers on terrestrial reptile spatial ecology, bat and freshwater turtle ecology, invasive species, birds, geckos, snakes and frogs for a variety of journals such as Biological Conservation, Austral Ecology, Journal of Herpetology and Wildlife Research, as well as conducting numerous internal reviews for other CSIRO staff publications.

Michael is Wildlife Officer for Northern Gulf Resource Management Group whose main interest is reptiles and amphibians and their distribution and habitat. Michael has been on committees of herpetological societies and frog clubs for most of his life, and has written a range of popular articles and scientific notes in diverse publications, from Reptiles Magazine – the world's leading popular magazine about reptiles, to Herpetofauna and Memoirs of the Queensland Museum. Michael also wrote for and produced the Cape York Herpetological Society’s journal Chondro from 1991 to 1998. Michael's vision for the North Queensland Naturalist is to enable both scientists and beginners to note and share their observations of north Queensland's incredible flora and fauna in one local publication.

Terry is a fauna ecologist working as a self-employed environmental consultant and, until COVID, as an international wildlife guide. Despite an interest in natural history since childhood, Terry did not work in the field until his mid-thirties, whilst undertaking a degree in environmental science at Griffith University. Before that he used various occupations to finance trips in pursuit of fauna in Australia and beyond. Once formally qualified, Terry worked for the Fauna Assessment Unit for the Environmental Protection Agency, conducting fauna surveys in the Brigalow Belt, and the Rainforest Cooperative Research Centre, as well as a number of bodies such as the Centre for Riverine Landscapes and then various consultancy companies. He has conducted fauna surveys in all of Queensland’s bioregions as well as in the Northern Territory, New South Wales, South Australia and Papua New Guinea. In particular, Terry has been involved in documenting the fauna of the Torres Strait and training Torres Strait Regional Authority rangers in field skills. He is an avid supplier of data to the Queensland WildNet (Wildlife Online) database and is a member of the Records Appraisal Committee of Birds Queensland. He has provided expert advice to a number of bodies such as the Squatter Pigeon Recovery Team and the Brigalow Belt Reptile Recovery Team. Terry worked as a vertebrate ecologist for the 2nd year environmental science subject Studies of an Asian Rainforest (Griffith University) at Danum Valley Field Centre, Sabah, Malaysia and Batu Apoi Forest Reserve, Brunei Darussalam. He has also worked as a wildlife guide in Brazil, China, Japan and Sabah (Malaysian Borneo) and as a bird guide in Australia for international birders. He is the author of a number of book chapters and journal and magazine articles on subjects such as rainforest restoration, the distribution of mammals in the Torres Strait, rainforest reptiles, riparian fauna and the impact of occupational health and safety requirements on fauna surveys. Terry is a keen photographer and provides photos of wildlife to books and many scientific and conservation organisations and government departments. 

Linda Reinhold studied terrestrial zoology and print journalism at UQ, with an Honours thesis on the taxonomy of bent-winged bats. She went on to work with microbats for several years, writing a world-first key to their echolocation calls. Swapping bats for numbats, Linda moved to Western Australia, initially working with Gilbert’s potoroos. She ended up as the ecologist on Project Eden for eight years, working with many wild and wonderful mammals and dabbling in herpetology. Working on the remote west coast involved both re-introducing native mammals to Project Eden (often radio-tracking them by small plane) and conducting fauna surveys on the islands of Shark Bay. She was an ambulance attendant in her spare time. In between mammal jobs, Linda spent some 28 seasons working with sea turtles, both in Australia and throughout the Caribbean. Since moving back to Queensland and settling in Cairns, Linda has mixed bushwalking with amateur mycology. An interest in glow-in-thedark fungi led her on night expeditions where she stumbled upon fluorescent mammals. This discovery led her to undertake Masters research on fluorescence in mammal fur. Linda has published a handful of scientific publications and popular articles. She was the newsletter editor of Science Queensland for The Royal Society of Queensland from 1999 to 2001. She has joined our team as a copy editor for the North Queensland Naturalist. 

Having grown up on a remote sheep station, Leanne has always had a passion for land management, the remote wilderness and the required connection between farming, natural history and the environment. From a very early age, Leanne witnessed her family property win awards for environmental practises, with extensive work in animal corridor plantations, wildlife surveys and regenerative agriculture practises, including the planting of legumes for soil rejuvenation and native tree plantings in riparian zones, and zones of significance. Leanne won a scholarship to study a science degree in Sweden, and majored in arid wilderness landscapes, her true love, and spent extensive time in the remote northern parts of Sweden in the artic rim. She has also gained qualifications in chemistry, teaching and wildlife rehabilitation, and is currently studying Agrifood systems and technology. Leanne is Far North Queensland Workforce Development Officer for agriculture. Her role is to initiate and collaborate opportunities to progress agricultural development, especially within the people. She helps provide the ability for rural regions to be competitive, resilient and responsive to future challenges and to develop capacity and capability, enabling them to lay a foundation for sustainable growth and long term prosperity. She sees this as the perfect platform to educate, upskill and encourage the cultivation of new networks to encourage conversation, concern and build trust regarding the well-being of our diverse flora and fauna and our need as a nation to unite in the preservation of all species. She has recently won the Queensland Regional, Rural and Remote Strong Women Leadership Award for 2015. She has also developed a Natural Science Award and Bursary for a student of excellence in Year 12 Far North Queensland that is beginning tertiary studies in the area of Natural Science. Leanne understands the power of connection. She sees herself as the interface between the scientists and the people of the land. She sees the advancement of rural networks with sharing of knowledge, mentoring, information and passion as insurmountable in equipping land managers with valuable tools, of feeling empowered and esteemed and enhancing joint decision making through collaboration of productive partnerships with the natural world and family farming. Anything we can do for our wilderness areas, for all of our incredible creatures and in educating people is what truly matters to Leanne. She is extremely motivated when needed, from both human and animals. In her “spare” time between work and land manager, Leanne is a wildlife rescuer and rehabilitator and releases native species back into the wild upon recovery. She is on the executive for Tablelands Wildlife Rescue Inc., and also a member of the Queensland and National Wildlife Rehabilitation Councils.  She loves nothing more than to infect others with her passion for life and the Australian outback. Because of her extensive years working in schools, Leanne is also really attached to getting families into the outdoors to care about nature, love the environment, and be fascinated by the wildlife and to commit themselves to be more responsible in their life choices. She is highly skilled in the teaching of minimal impact techniques and is often found leading “at risk” students on remote hiking and caving expeditions on a purely volunteer role. She believes passionate people are more fully engaged in life and will create purpose far greater than themselves. 

Amy is a wildlife veterinarian based on the Atherton Tablelands. She has numerous publications on various aspects of wildlife medicine and recently completed a PhD on Lumholtz’s Tree-kangaroo (Dendrolagus lumholtzi). She is interested not only in the health of animals but also in their use of habitat and the roles they play in the ecosystem of far north Queensland. Her current research interests center around koalas in far north Queensland but remains interested in other arboreal folivores, especially tree-kangaroos.

Renée is an experienced marketing professional and graphic designer. Scientifically trained as an ecologist, but drawn to the creative industries, Renée is now actively involved in conservation volunteering while working in the creative sector in service of organisations with shared vision and values. Her Honours Thesis focussed on the effects of habitat fragmentation on the Pale-yellow Robin across the Atherton Tablelands.