Alan Pearse | ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers

Research assistant

Queensland University of Technology

I am a research assistant for Dr Erin Peterson. I have a passion for environmental and ecological statistics, and my specialities are GIS, scientific programming, and experimental design.

Research Interests:

Adaptive survey design

Environmental monitoring

GIS

Modelling of biological and environmental systems

Qualifications:

Bachelor of Science (Earth Science), Bachelor of Mathematics (Statistical Science)

Projects

Monitoring through many eyes: Integrating datasets to improve monitoring of the Great Barrier Reef

Enormous effort is invested in monitoring the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), but data collection is currently fragmented over dozens of publicly and privately funded organisations, with data collected using different methods and for different purposes. As a result, the data are rarely analysed together.

Rapid spatial risk modelling for management of early weed invasions: balancing ecological complexity and operational needs

Invasive weeds can threaten native biodiversity and negatively impact on agriculture. A group of researchers at QUT and CSIRO, including an ACEMS member, designed and implemented a new framework for rapidly modelling the invasion risk of weeds using Bayesian belief networks.

Prizes, awards and special recognition

2019

2019 Spatial Excellence Award Queensland for People and Community was awarded to Julie Vercelloni, Erin Peterson, Kerrie Mengersen, Alan Pearse, Bryce Christensen, Edgar Santos-Fernandez, Ross Brown, Grace Heron. Awarded from the FrontierSI.

2017

Australian Esri Young Scholar Award was awarded to Alan Pearse. Awarded from the Esri Australia.

I was awarded the Esri Young Scholar Award for my work on IDW-Plus, an ArcGIS toolbox that calculates spatially explicit watershed attributes for stream survey sites. As a result, I was awarded an 8-day trip to San Diego in the U.S. where I presented the toolbox at the Esri User Conference.

Publications

Invited talks, refereed proceedings and other conference outputs

2018

Pearse, A. R., McGree J., Som N., & Peterson E. (2018). SSNdesign: an R package for pseudo-Bayesian optimal and adaptive design on stream networks. UseR!2018.

Journal Articles

2018

Vercelloni, J., Clifford S., M. Caley J., Pearse A. R., Brown R., James A., et al. (2018). Using virtual reality to estimate aesthetic values of coral reefs. Royal Society Open Science. 5(4), 172226. doi: 10.1098/rsos.172226

Peterson, N., Hamilton G. S., Almany G., Pita J., Choat J. Howard, Hamilton R. J., et al. (2018). Giant coral reef fishes display markedly different susceptibility to night spearfishing. Ecology and Evolution. 8(20), 10247 - 10256. doi: 10.1002/ece3.4501