Dr.
Elvira Poloczanska is an ecologist and ecological population modeler
with
interests
in intertidal and shallow coastal systems. She
is
currently a research fellow at CSIRO, Marine and Atmospheric
Research,
Australia under Wealth from
Oceans National Flagship Programme. She plans to undertake research
which aims to improve understanding of climatic variability and
impacts of climate change for Australian marine ecosystems. Dr.
Poloczanska earned her PhD in 2001 and her B.S. in 1996 in
Aquatic
Bioscience,
both at the University of Glasgow. Dr. Poloczanska's PhD work on
sandeels (forage fish) included a multi-disciplinary study which
covered developing and testing of age-structured population models
and applied fisheries science. Ecological modelling is a major part
of her research and is designed to make predictions of the
consequences of individual behaviour and competitive interactions
for populations and communities. Dr Poloczanska also was involved a
major four-year multi-partner British and Irish project, Marine
Biodiversity and Climate Change (MarClim) led by the Marine
Biological Association in collaboration with Plymouth Marine
Laboratory, The Scottish Association for Marine Science, The
University of Plymouth and University College Cork. The aim of
MarClim is to assess and forecast the influence of climatic change
on marine biodiversity in Britain and Ireland using long term and
current data on intertidal rocky shore indicator species. Her role
in this project was to participate in resurveys of sites from the
west coast of Scotland and produce climate envelope models to
predict potential future species distributions under different
climate change scenarios. Dr. Poloczanska is current research in
climate change and climatic variability includes climate driven
interactions, biogeographic modelling, and implications for
conservation management.
Email:
e.poloczanska@conservationinstitute.org
