Dr Nancy Schellhorn
Principal Research Scientist, Research Team Leader
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Biography
Dr. Schellhorn’s research focuses on landscape scale pest management. Increasing food productivity while reducing our impact on the natural resource base is one of the biggest challenges of our time. Dr. Schellhorn has made several important contributions to this area. She and her collaborators have developed and advanced the concept Pest Suppressive Landscapes (PSL), which provides a way of measuring, designing and managing agricultural landscape mosaics for productivity and biodiversity. Underpinning the concept of PSL are complexities dealing with insect movement and dynamics at multiple spatial and temporal scales. By combining large-scale experimentation with ecological modelling, she and her team are able to inform landscape design and recommend management options for ‘softening’ the agricultural landscape matrix for the capture of ecosystem services of pest control. With her colleagues in CSIRO Data61, Dr. Schellhorn has lead the development of an insect monitoring invention to better understand insect movement, one of the most poorly understood, yet fundamentally important biological processes. The novel device enables capture of real-time, geo-referenced insect images of broad species type. Deployment of the devise advances our understanding of insect habitat use, and has wide reaching application for bio-security, and reducing insecticide application and load in the environment.
Other Interests
Dr Schellhorn is currently Chief Investigator for the Rural R&D for Profit project on 'Adaptive Area-wide Management of Qfly', and has lead the National multi-agency GRDC projects: ‘Pest Suppressive Landscapes’ and the National Invertebrate Pest Initiative (NIPI), and a CRDC project co-lead by Dr. Cate Paull, on ‘Area-wide pest suppression in transgenic landscapes: Implications for resistance management’. She and her team have recently completed two Horticulture Australia – AusVeg funded projects, ‘Revegetation by Design QLD: Natural resource management and IPM’ and ‘Getting the most out of Eretmocerus hayati: an effective natural enemy of silverleaf whitefly’. The spatial ecology team bring together diverse skills and interests in insect ecology and taxonomy, vector biology, ecological modelling, and GIS with special emphasis on ecological food webs, dispersal and spread in heterogeneous landscapes, and multi-trophic interactions (eg. predator-prey & vector-host relationships).
Professional Areas
Current Roles
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Chief Investigator
Rural R&D for Profit - Adaptive Area-wide Management of Qfly
Academic Qualifications
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1998
PhD
University of Minnesota, USA -
1992
Ecology
University of Missouri, USA -
1991
Organization for Tropical Studies
University of Costa Rica -
1987
BS, Agriculture
University of Missouri-Columbia, USA
Achievements and Awards
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2014
Exceptional Leadership Award
CSIRO -
2014
Outstanding Team Award
CSIRO - Ecosystem Sciences -
2012
Science & Innovation
Cotton, Communities & Catchment CRC -
2012-2015
Julius Career Award
CSIRO -
2005
Outstanding Achievement Award
DPI-VIC -
2014
Chairman's Medal
OCE
Attachments
Publications
We have publications by Dr Nancy Schellhorn