Dr Erin Peterson - Erin Peterson Consulting
Healthy Land & Water Science Committee.
Dr Erin Peterson - Science Committee
Dr Erin Peterson has over 20 years of experience as a government and academic research scientist, and independent consultant working at the interface of natural resource management, geographic information science (GIS), and environmental statistics.
Her research and consulting work is primarily focused on the next generation of environmental monitoring in terrestrial, marine, and river ecosystems using new technologies. This includes innovative methods of data capture; the analysis of near real-time data collected using in situ sensors; and accounting for data quality and uncertainty when combining different data sources, including citizen-science data. The results of these projects have been used by government, industry, and NGOs to support condition and trend assessments, spatial prioritization of management actions, evaluations of the effectiveness of management actions, and natural and anthropogenic impact assessments under current and future land-use and climate scenarios.
Erin is the owner of EP Consulting in Brisbane and an Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre for Excellence in Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers (ACEMS). She received her B.S. in Conservation Forestry from Michigan State University, her M.S. in Forestry from Colorado State University, and her Ph.D. in Earth Resources from Colorado State University.
She is strongly motivated by science that delivers measurable real-world impact - helping organisations learn from data and gain meaningful insights, leading to improvements in how they allocate resources, sustainably manage natural and modified environments, conserve species, improve lives, and enhance livelihoods.
She has published over 70 peer-reviewed journal articles and reports, which have been cited over 3500 times. She and her team were finalists for the 2019 Australian Museum Eureka Prize for Innovation in Citizen Science, won the 2019 Asia-Pacific Spatial Excellence Award for People and Community, with industry partner FrontierSI, and the 2016 US Forest Service Rise to the Future Award for developing comprehensive and high-resolution status and trend information currently being used by dozens of US National Forests and partner agencies.
Dr Peterson is currently an Adjunct Associate Professor at Queensland University of Technology and serves on the Southeast Queensland Healthy Land & Water Science Advisory Committee.