Sigrid Heise-Pavlov

School for Field Studies, Centre for Rainforest Studies, Australia

I began my career in Germany working on the population dynamics of pest rodents to develop a model to simulate their population growth for an efficient application of control methods. During post-doctoral fellowships, granted by the German Academic Exchange Service and the European Union, I worked in England and Belgium on the chemical communication of vertebrates in combination with aspects of the spread of rodent borne zoonoses.

I immigrated to Australia in 1998 and became involved in feral pig management in the tropical lowland rainforest of the Daintree Coast in NE Queensland, and in the conservation of threatened lowland rainforest types while working for the Bush Heritage Australia. From 2006 to 2009 I was Associate Lecturer at the Institute for Geobotany of the Wilhelm Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany and the Department of Vegetation Ecology of the Technical University of Munich, Germany, where I lectured on the geology, biogeography, vegetation and conservation of Australia’s ecosystems, and organised and conducted field excursions of German students across Australia.

In 2008 I started my position as a lecturer for rainforest ecology at the Centre for Rainforest Studies at The School for Field Studies. My research and teaching are focused on gathering information that supports community and governmentally based conservation projects such as restoration of rainforests, colonization of restored rainforest by wildlife, identification of locations for wildlife road crossings, erosion prevention and roadside vegetation management.