Dr Matthew Luskin

Matthew heads The Ecological Cascades Lab [link] in the UQ School of Biological Sciences and is a Chief Investigator with the UQ Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science and is an ARC DECRA Fellow from 2022-2025.

We are accepting qualified PhD students for domestic and international wildlife projects. Potential PhD topics include: how does the loss of apex predators influence lower trophic levels? How does selective hunting of particular species (e.g. pigs) affect non-hunted competitors (e.g. deer)? How does wildlife influence plant communities and traits? How do invasive predators affect biodiversity? How can we integrate existing camera trap datasets to conduct powerful analyses and for monitoring?

Our lab is interested in all aspects of wildlife ecology, including food-web ecology, plant-animal interactions, and applied conservation science. We have experience with tropical forests in Southeast Asia and are expanding new fieldwork across the Wet Tropics of Queensland. We are interested in the impacts of habitat fragmentation, agriculture, hunting, and invasive species, on wildlife communities.

Prior to joining UQ, Matthew worked with the Smithsonian Institute's Forest Global Earth Observatory (ForestGEO) to coordinate surveys of wildlife communities in Sumatra, Borneo, Peninsular Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore. These projects link apex predators to herbivores to trees and have revealed how oil palm expansion has restructured ecological communities and triggered trophic cascades. Matthew has now begun a large longterm project in the Dja Faunal Rerseve of Cameroon with the Congo Basin Institute and collabroates cloestly with UCLA on the these projects. Matthew obtained his PhD in Environmental Science, Policy and Management from the University of California, Berkeley.