Mark Adams

Professor Adams has held Professorial appointments at the University of Western Australia, the University of Melbourne, and most recently at UNSW. Mark publishes widely with a focus on sustainability and biogeochemistry of natural and managed ecosystems. His published work includes more than 150 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, major texts, and many commissioned reports for governments and industries. 

His current research interests include:

• Adaptation of plants to stress – mechanisms by which plants adapt to extremes of temperature, salinity and to high CO2
• Productivity – carbon use efficiency of plants, nutrient requirements, photosynthesis, respiration
• Water use by plants – especially application of stable isotopes and sap flow techniques for quantifying use of soil and groundwater sources of water and water-use efficiency
• Fire and forest management – especially the effects of fire on the carbon balance of native forests.

Mark has been the recipient of a range of fellowships and awards in Australia (QEII Fellowship), France (Bede Morris Fellowship), NZ (Erskine Fellowship) and Germany (Alexander Von Humboldt Fellowship, Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award).  A passionate believer in “conservation through use”, Mark enjoys working with postgraduate students and with people who live on and work the land.  In addition to tropical and temperate Australia, Mark has conducted research in Pakistan, Papua New Guinea and Kenya as well as in Europe, the UK and the USA.

In 2006 he finished a six-year term as a member of the Board of Trustees for the International Centre for Research in Agro forestry (ICRAF) at Nairobi, Kenya and as the ICRAF trustee on the board of the Centre for International Forestry Research, Bogor, Indonesia.  He works closely with the International Atomic Energy Agency on developing stable isotope techniques suitable for assessing the sustainability of land management in developing countries.

Some of Mark’s recent invited lectures (including invited research publications) are: the Stockholm Environment Institute, York, UK (2001), INRA, France (2006), Woods Hole Ecosystem Research Centre (2007), North American Forest Ecology Workshop (2007), University of California, Berkeley (2008).  This year he will give lectures at Cambridge University and at Stanford University.