Dr Gavin Rees

Gavin trained as a microbiologist and has worked on projects as diverse as waster water treatment, using microbes to clean up hydrocarbon-contaminated soils and water and the microbiology of high temperature oil fields.

For the last 20+ years, he has turned his work to understanding the many roles microbes play in rivers and wetlands. This has led to projects demonstrating the role of microbes in forming acid-sulfate soils in inland wetlands, carbon and nutrient dynamics in rivers and wetlands and most recently, food webs and ecology of rivers. The underlying thread in all his work is understanding how organisms respond to a variety of environmental conditions, whether natural or human origin, and the consequences of those responses. Showing how river food webs respond to managed flows is an important part of his research.