Dr Cameron Fletcher

Current activities

Dr Cameron Fletcher studies the way people interact with the environment in systems where it is this interaction that drives change, to guide more effective management and solve Australia's environmental challenges.

Dr Fletcher leads research collaborations leveraging advanced digital methods to identify optimal management options, and digital delivery methods to provide actionable recommendations to managers. He has applied his approaches across a number of domains, and his current research focuses on informing the management of Crown-Of-Thorns Starfish (COTS) on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR).

Dr Fletcher also leads science strategy at CSIRO. He is currently the Science Strategy Lead for the Water Security Program of CSIRO Environment, working with domain experts from across the Program to guide the development of a new foundation for Australian water research at CSIRO. He was previously Acting Digital Lead for CSIRO Environment, developing strategy for digital transformation of the science of 800 researchers focussed on solving Australia's largest environmental challenges. In 2019 he led the collaborative design of an Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Strategy for CSIRO Land & Water.

Dr Fletcher is an interdisciplinary scientist, using a wide range of techniques from computer modelling, mathematics, and economics, to ecological approaches and the techniques of social science. He leads teams containing specialists from various disciplinary backgrounds, integrating the insights from experts in different fields to build a whole-of-system understanding to inform government policy and management.

Since 2018, Dr Fletcher's work, with colleagues from a wide array of research and management institutions, has provided the ecological underpinning for the Australian government's ~$240m COTS Control Program on the GBR. In this time, the Program has protected over 400 reefs through targeted removal over 1.1 million starfish. In 2022, this impactful work was recognised as a finalist for the Eureka Prize for Applied Environmental Research, and in 2023 it won the National Banksia Award for Sustainability.

Dr Fletcher currently leads the Response Subprogram of the Great Barrier Reef Foundation's COTS Control Innovation Program (CCIP), encompassing 11 projects across a number of research and management partners. He leads projects spanning information systems, digital workflows for on-water data, digitally delivered decision-support tools, and digital methods for multi-stakeholder prioritization in contested systems. He additionally contributes to projects developing large-scale ecological models of the GBR, and economic analysis of management strategies, and coordinates input from projects developing ocean current dispersal models, Traditional Owner perspectives, and novel control methods.

Dr Fletcher previously led the Decision Support & Modelling Program Area of CCIP, where he coordinated the collaborative development of the national research strategy and investment plan across research partners. Between 2015 - 2020, he led the integrated modelling component of the NESP Integrated Pest Management of Crown-of-Thorns Starfish (COTS) Research Program. This body of work builds off Dr Fletcher’s long legacy of underpinning more effective management decisions in Australia’s Wet Tropics World Heritage Area with detailed understandings of the ecological processes driving pest populations, including weeds (NERP Invasive species risks and responses in the Wet Tropics project) and animals (IACRC Prioritising Adaptation Actions for Managing Invasive Animals Under Climate Change project).

Background

Dr Fletcher’s early work in CSIRO’s Complex Systems Science initiative focussed on the dynamic relationship between people that harvest renewable resources and the environment, including indigenous communities and modern farmers. He extended the underlying principles of this work to look at the economics of tree-change urbanization in Far North Queensland, and the potential impacts of changing urbanization patterns on water quality on the Great Barrier Reef. More recently, he has worked with colleagues to developed neural network classification techniques to estimate how well Australia’s National Reserve System will protect our ecosystems under future climates.

A large part of his continuing work at CSIRO has involved designing ecologically effective management strategies for invasive weeds and pests. He has worked on the management of Miconia calvescens and other Class 1 weed species, as well as feral pigs (Sus scrofa) in and around the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area in northern Queensland, as well as community rodent control techniques in rice fields in Vietnam and Indonesia.

From 2008 - 2014, Dr Fletcher led work on the economics of climate adaptation to coastal inundation in Australia’s urban coastal areas. With his team at CSIRO and collaborators at University of Queensland, he measured how much value security against inundation added to a residential house, and simulated how rising sea levels under climate change would affect property values across South East Queensland in future. This novel insight helped local councils decide how much to spend on adaptation actions in the present to avoid damages due to inundation events in the future. He also extended this work to look at equity and how the economic costs of climate change adaptation are distributed across communities; as well as the impacts of climate change on road infrastructure and how institutional interactions across various levels of government enable or constrain adaptation options that can help protect our communities from these events.

Dr Fletcher was previously the Group Leader for Environmental Informatics within the Water Security Program of Land & Water. The EI Group develops digital systems to enable improved and sustainable management of natural resources by addressing challenges across the entire information supply chain, including social, technical and informational aspects. It works to achieve this by ensuring: environmental data are shared; environmental data are analysed and transformed by trusted processes; and environmental knowledge is accessed and applied by decision makers. The Group encompasses expertise in: environmental modelling and simulation; information architectures, infrastructures and data integration; social architectures for information infrastructure; data visualisation and analytics; web systems design and architectures; linked data and semantic web technologies; data and information engineering; geospatial data; development of data and information standards; machine learning and artificial intelligence; and knowledge design and delivery.