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Welcome to the UQU Environmental Collective Column! At UQU Environment, we are proud to be a collective driven by students, for students. Through this column, we hope to create a space to spotlight the incredible environmental work happening across campus, from cutting-edge research to clubs and individuals that are making a real impact. Our goal is to promote sustainability, create opportunities for student engagement, and connect to you, our UQ community. Whether you’re interested in a career in conservation or you are simply looking for small sustainability swaps, we hope to offer something for everyone.
Have your say: Shape UQ’s Sustainability Strategy
The UQU Environmental Collective is thrilled to share that we are working with the UQ Sustainability Board to help shape the 2026–2029 Sustainability Strategy, and we’re doing it with your help! Through our Sustainability Survey, we hope to provide students, staff, and researchers with the opportunity to have their voices heard and share how they think UQ could improve to become a more sustainable campus. We are also incredibly interested in understanding how students engage with sustainability and specifically the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in their coursework.
Whether you want to suggest small tweaks or ambitious goals, we want to hear from you! Scan the QR code below or find the link on our Instagram @uquenvironmentalcollective
Environmental Hero: Dr Leslie Roberson
Dr Leslie Roberson is a research consultant with CSIRO and a postdoctoral researcher at the School of the Environment here at UQ, where she also completed her PhD. Her innovative work in fisheries science has earned her significant recognition within the scientific community, including the prestigious 2024 UQ Foundation Research Excellence Award. Chelsea Golding from the UQU Environmental Collective sat down with Dr Roberson to talk about her journey, her research, and her vision for the future of sustainable fisheries.
Hi Dr Roberson, it’s great to have you here today! To start, can you tell us a bit about how you chose this path? What has driven your interest in marine science, and specifically fisheries?
“I actually started in environmental science with a passion for the ocean. Like many people, it was a bit of a passion job.” Her first experience in marine science came through sea turtle conservation, after receiving a fellowship to travel to Ghana to study turtle populations. “But when I got there, I found there were barely any turtles left. What I did see were massive trawlers sitting just offshore, and I realised there was something much bigger going on.”
That moment sparked a shift for Dr Roberson and began her interest in fisheries as a cornerstone of marine conservation. “Fisheries are just one piece of the puzzle in marine science, but they’re a huge one,” she said. Her research is grounded in the belief that humans are part of ecosystems, not separate from them. “Trying to study environmental systems without including human behaviour or working towards some perfect, idealised model just isn’t productive.”
That’s amazing. So that pivotal moment has led you to your current work, for which you recently received the 2024 UQ Foundation Research Excellence Award! Your project was recognised for ‘combining data and expert knowledge’ to address the issue of bycatch. Can you tell us more about this?
“Absolutely. Bycatch is one of the biggest obstacles to achieving a more sustainable global seafood supply,” Dr Roberson says. “Traditionally, fisheries management has relied on top-down approaches, and many management models assume boats behave identically, but that’s simply not how humans work.”
Her work is based on that simple idea. By blending statistical modelling with behavioural science, Dr Roberson aims to identify ‘gold star’ fishers who are already using effective bycatch-reduction practices. The goal is to understand how these approaches can be adapted and shared more broadly.
“This helps bridge the gap between science and lived experience. It’s not just about data, it’s about people,” she continued. “We’re working with skilled fishers to identify realistic conservation targets for threatened species.”
That’s fantastic, using models that utilise anecdotal and local knowledge. In your view, what defines a ‘gold star’ fishery? Are there any examples you look to?
“A gold star fishery is one where individual fishers are engaged in conservation outcomes, not just following the rules because they have to,” she says. “It’s where science, regulation, and practical experience all align to support both ecological and economic resilience.”
As you touched on earlier, you have had a very international career, having worked and studied across the United States, South America, Africa, and Australia. Was that international experience something you sought out, and how has it shaped your work?
“I’ve always had a passion for travel, and one of the benefits of this field is that it’s globally applicable. It has definitely influenced my work,” she says. “I’ve seen firsthand how local contexts reflect global patterns. Many of the challenges communities face, even on opposite sides of the world, are interconnected, particularly in fisheries.”
As someone who has been able to set their own path and contribute to impactful research in marine and conservation science, what advice would you give to students or early-career researchers looking to enter this space?
“Build as many skills as you can, from technical tools like data analysis to communication and working with stakeholders. Find your niche, but also make sure to take a step back and look at systems as a whole. A systems view is often what helps you understand where problems actually emerge from.”
Thank you so much, Dr Roberson. It’s been amazing talking about your work. All the best!
If you know an environmental hero contributing to tackling the world’s environmental issues, or you yourself are involved in meaningful environmental work that you would like to share, feel free to reach out to us via our Instagram @uquenvironmentalcollective.
Unpacking the UQ Lakes revival project and its implications for careers in environmental engineering and nature-based solutions with Professor Badin Gibbes
The UQ lakes are a stunning edition to the St Lucia campus, providing scenic lunch spots and habitats for native animals. Students who’ve been at UQ for a few years would have noticed the transition of the lake. While many may have assumed this to be an aesthetic upgrade, with a walking track and new seating areas, it’s been a technical feat of environmental engineering to save a polluted and vulnerable ecosystem, designed in part by UQ professor Badin Gibbes.
Badin began with the lake’s history, that the lake wasn’t always there, it was established in the late 1940s as a campus renewal project after World War Two. “It was formed by basically damming an old waterline, which we think was called Carmody creek … like a lot of the work done in that era, water quality and ecosystem health weren’t a top priority for the engineering assessments.” The lake remained unchanged until 2019 when the frequency of harmful algal blooms got to a point where a decision had to be made about what to do with it in the future.
Badin explained how, from an environmental engineering point of view, it’s well-known that shallow lakes have finite life spans in a “clear and well vegetated state”, considered to be a healthy ecosystem, and there’s a long history of these systems shifting to a “turbid or muddy unvegetated state”. It’s very challenging to revert them back naturally, they need some sort of intervention. That field of environmental engineering has been growing from about the 1980s, “we don’t know everything yet … it’s a field where there’s a lot of new things being discovered and a lot of innovation”.
“In about 2019 UQ launched a review of the lake and came up with different options for the upgrade and restoration … after quite a bit of study and advice from an international panel of experts they made what I consider to be a really brave and forward-looking decision to go for a complete restoration of the ecosystem. So that involved draining of the lake, reprofiling and recontouring and adding in a storm water treatment wetland system as well as a water circulation system.” This plan was prompted by the finding that the residence time of the lake was far longer than the recommended guideline values.
“To maintain healthy water quality in a system like that, you need a residence time of about 15 to 30 days … the original lake was somewhere between 19 and 120 days. So not a lot of flushing, not a lot of renewal of the water system, and hence over time we saw a slow but steady degradation of the ecosystem … a lot of the renewal work focused on trying to reduce the residence time down into that optimal range.”
The stormwater treatment wetland is “firmly rooted in the philosophy of nature-based solutions rather than looking at engineered solutions … the wetland uses natural bioprocessing and cycling capacities of the wetland plants to remove sediments and nutrients from water flowing into the lake. Which is then thought to promote better water quality from the system. So, they’re the key design features, along with a recirculation system. Water is pumped from the main open water zone in the lake and circulated slowly back through the wetland system to improve that polishing and filtering of the water.”
When asked about the fountain feature Badin said that though it “does a little bit in terms of oxygenation … it keeps dissolved oxygen levels in the water up” that it’s mainly a legacy feature, being donated by alumni.
The lakes revival project is unique as “there aren’t that many examples of that level of lake restoration globally”. Research into how these ecosystems recover after revival works is in its infancy. When trying to answer the question of whether it’s worth investing that much into revival projects like this one or just filling the lake, there isn’t currently enough information. “What we do know is in the first two to five years of the life of these restored lakes, they often experience really horrendous algal blooms, that’s one thing that’s going to be interesting to see if we are able to pick that pattern up and understand it a bit better. We’ve got a range of engineering and environmental science students who are actively involved in the monitoring for their student projects, so it’s providing a really good opportunity for students to work at the cutting-edge of this nature-based solutions approach, as well as providing really valuable information for the research and the design communities to better understand it.”
“In my opinion UQ properties and facilities and UQ senior executives more generally should be applauded for making a brave decision to do such an extensive redevelopment, because that sort of courage is rare in the environmental systems generally.”
Small, shallow water lake ecosystems are more important than they are recognised for. Badin went on to talk about a recent PhD project that estimated the volume of small lake ecosystems across Australia, which are often not captured, and found “the volume in these small systems exceeds the combined volume of all our major water storage lakes nationally.” These systems outweigh all the big water infrastructure, while also being “some of the most understudied systems nationally.”
“The big area of interest more broadly, globally, nationally and locally is trying to understand what all environmental systems are going to do under future climate scenarios. So that’s a really hot topic, not only in the research space but also with engineers and managers of both natural systems, like waterways, forests and wetlands, as well as engineers that are trying to manage our civil engineering infrastructure, like roads, transport systems, buildings.”
Professor Gibbes finished the interview by talking about all the opportunities in this field, saying we’re entering a “data deluge”, where so much information is surfacing to try and describe what the future might look like that we’re “drowning in the data and we need to look at new techniques to try and understand what the data’s telling us” and how to apply this. It’s a “nexus between big data engineering and environmental engineering, which requires a really unique set of skills that a lot of graduates and undergraduates at UQ have. What I’m saying is there’s an opportunity for huge impacts here, right across that big spectrum.”
“There’s more work than there are people with the skill sets to do the work, and the other advantage or potential drawback in this area is there are no quick fixes. It’s a very long game when we look at things like nature-based solutions and designing for more sustainable futures. I’ve been working in the field for 30 years now … the end goals are pretty much the same as they were 30 years ago in terms of where we want to get to. So, there’s a very clear picture of what a great future can look like, but the time frames involved in actually implementing the future and getting investment and convincing people to do it are often longer than particularly undergraduates can appreciate. So, there’s a danger here that you get burnt out and frustrated because change doesn’t happen fast enough. But having the change happen at all is an absolutely remarkable thing, and so when you do see investment in restoration projects like the UQ lake it’s a really important indicator or milestone on that journey towards a more sustainable future that shows you what is possible when everything aligns from the policy makers, those who control the funds and investment all the way down to the technical experts when they’re able to design and implement those solutions. It’s a rich and exciting area to work in if you’re interested.”
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