Professor Susan Laurance

James Cook University

Susan Laurance is a Professor at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia. She studies how human activities impact tropical rainforest plant and wildlife communities. She is especially interested in how vulnerable wildlife and plant species are affected by major land-use and climate change. Her work spans much of the tropical world, including the Amazon and tropical Australia.

She has maintained a long-term involvement at the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project in Brazil, which is the largest, longest-running experimental study into how human land-use impacts rainforest communities. This dataset has also contributed significantly to our current understanding of forest dynamics, floristic diversity and carbon stock and pulses in tropical rainforests.

In Australia, she has developed an extensive research program that continues her work in global change and tropical forests at the Daintree Rainforest Observatory (DRO), where they have initiated an ambitious experiment to induce an artificial drought in order to study its effects on rainforest biodiversity. Her other research programs include understanding the biotic and abiotic drivers of secondary forest composition and carbon sequestration, and how fragmentation and human land-use influences disease vectors. She is a named investigator on >$9 million in research grants and lead investigator on >$3 million. She has authored/coauthored more than 170 peer-reviewed research articles.