Nick Murray at Bowra, western Queensland, June 2011

Massive congratulations to Dr Nick Murray, whose PhD has been awarded! Well done Nick, we are super proud of you, the first primary-supervised PhD graduate from our lab.

Nick’s PhD on migratory shorebirds and their habitats took him right across the East Asian -Australasian Flyway from Australia to Alaska and many places in between including Cambodia, Indonesia, China and South Korea. He took on a project that was initially branded “crazily ambitious” by experts in the field, and totally nailed it. In a series of four papers, Nick developed a new method to map intertidal habitats from satellite data, and used it to reveal massive losses of staging habitat for Australia’s migratory shorebirds in East Asia. This led to Nick show that the entire intertidal ecosystem of the Yellow Sea is at imminent risk of extinction, and that intertidal habitat is chronically underprotected in the Yellow Sea.

Nick is now a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at the Centre for Ecosystem Science, University of New South Wales, where he works on monitoring ecosystem dynamics, enabling assessments of the status, risk of collapse and drivers of ecosystem endangerment.