Sam Nicol


Me at the beach on Middle Island, in the Keppel Islands Group,
at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef here in Queensland

Name: Sam Nicol
Position: PhD Student, University of Queensland
Department: Mathematics/Spatial Ecology
Office: 67-620

Postal Address:
Department of Mathematics
University of Queensland
St Lucia, Qld 4072
Australia

Email: snicol@maths.uq.edu.au

Go to UQ Maths

Go to The Spatial Ecology Lab

Some Stuff About Me:

I am a PhD student at the University of Queensland. My supervisors are Hugh Possingham, Iadine Chades and Simon Linke. My thesis is entitled "Optimal Landscape Reconstruction Decisions for Metapopulation Management". What that means is I write mathematical models to try to help conservation managers make good decisions about how to keep endangered species alive. My models generally focus on metapopulations- which means populations of endangered species that live in fragmented habitats.

Before I started my PhD, I lived in Perth, Western Australia. There I completed a B.Sc/B.Engineering(Hons) at the University of Western Australia, majoring in environmental engineering. I'm still keenly interested in hydrology. After graduation I worked for the Western Australian Environmental Protection Agency Service Unit doing impact assessment, and then for an engineering consulting company doing water supply planning. Following that, I divulged my ever-itchy feet and flew off to Africa to explore the wonders of Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Tunisia and France.

Outside of my PhD studies, I try to get out and about and explore Queensland as often as I can. I love camping and bird watching, and am always keen to give something different a go.


Me enjoying a gorgeous day on the water while on a sea kayaking trip out to Bribie Island, just an
hour's drive north of Brisbane

Research:

I'm interested in applying decision theory to metapopulation management. I use simple discrete-time Markov Chains in conjunction with a technique called Stochastic Dynamic Programming (SDP) to work out the optimal way to choose between different management options. Because this is pretty involved stuff, my real challenge is then to simplify the results I get into basic "rules of thumb" so that they can be easily implemented.

I'm interested in any application of decision theory to conservation, so I've started to look more broadly at algorithms from the articifical intelligence and machine learning literature with help from my associate supervisor Iadine Chades. I've started using alternative algorithms to SDP (such as Q-learning/reinforcement learning, heuristic on-line methods, and state-space discretization methods) that will help us to solve much more complex optimal management problems in ecology. Its exciting stuff!

On top of all that, I'm also working with a group of freshwater ecologists studying fish dispersal on the Moonie River (near the Qld/NSW border) through my associate supervisor Simon Linke. Hopefully this wil lead to some great work that uses my background in hydrology and engineering and also my new passion for ecological modelling.

A popular science article I wrote for Decision Point magazine can be found here.

Publications:
Imberger,J; Mamouni,E; Anderson,J; Ng,M; Nicol,S ; Veale,A (2007). The index of sustainable functionality: a new adaptive, multicriteria measurement of sustainability- application to Western Australia. International Journal of Environment and Sustainable Development, Vol. 6, No. 3. pp 323-355.

Nicol, S., Possingham, H.P. (In press). Should Metapopulation Restoration Strategies Increase Patch Area of Number of Patches? (Accepted June 2009 for publication in Ecological Applications).

Conference papers:
Nicol, S., Chades, I., Linke, S., Possingham, H.P. (2009). Conservation Decision-Making in Large State Spaces. In: Proceedings of the 18th World IMACS Congress and MODSIM09 International Congress on Modelling and Simulation. Cairns, Australia, 13–17th July 2009.

Conference Presentations:
Nicol, S., Chades, I., Linke, S., Possingham, H.P. (2009). Conservation Meets Bellman's Curse: A new approach to solving highly complex metapopulation management problems. 2nd European Congress of Conservation Biology, Prague, Czech Republic. 01-05 September 2009.

Nicol, S., Chades, I., Linke, S., Possingham, H.P. (2009). Conservation Decision-Making in Large State Spaces. 10th International Congress of Ecology, Brisbane, Australia. 16-21 August 2009.

Nicol, S., Possingham, H.P. (2008). Expand or Multiply: The relative values of metapopulation patch network size and patch area. 22nd Annual Meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology, Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA. 13-17 July 2008.

Site visitors since June 2008