Gaia Resources recently had the opportunity to support some UWA PhD research through the donation of the use of a ruggedisd PDA to conduct field data collection in the south west near Walpole.

Nicolas Faivre is currently researching the influence of fire on biodiversity in a number of different areas throughout the world or in his words:

“The PhD project is addressing the question of how pyrodiversity (i.e. spatiotemporal variability of fire attributes) influences multi-scale biodiversity of Mediterranean landscapes. The objective of the work is to improve our understanding of fire regimes at an operational level to determine how best to utilize fire for maintaining biodiversity in threatened hotspot areas.”

Nicolas in action in the field collecting data

The comparison between European and Australian Mediterranean ecosystems on key issues concerning fire management at the landscape level has never been undertaken before and the expected results will be of international interest.