Rate My Professor Geoff Cary

Geoff Cary is Professor in bushfire science, Deputy School Director, and Associate Director (Research) at the Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University. He holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Environmental Biology with Honours from the University of Technology Sydney (1992) and a PhD in Ecology from the Australian National University (1999), with his doctoral thesis titled 'Predicting fire regimes and their ecological effects in spatially complex landscapes.' His academic career at ANU includes positions as Senior Lecturer from 2005 to 2012, Associate Professor from 2012 to 2021, and Professor since 2022. Cary teaches bushfire dynamics and management in undergraduate and graduate courses such as Fire in the Environment, and contributes to subjects including Island Sustainable Development, Climate and its Applications, Climate Change Vulnerability & Adaptation, Environmental Policy, and Fundamentals of Environment and Sustainability. He has supervised or co-supervised 23 Higher Degree Research scholars (19 PhDs and equivalents completed) and 19 Honours scholars, primarily on bushfire-related topics, with their thesis research leading to approximately 30 journal articles.

Cary's research specializations encompass landscape-scale simulation modelling of fire management and climate change impacts on fire regimes, fire ecology across scales from genes to communities, house loss during wildland fires, and laboratory studies of fire behaviour. He co-led an international collaboration of landscape-scale wildland fire simulation modellers and has delivered keynote presentations, including on fuel management and house loss at the Wildland Fire Canada Conference (Kananaskis, 2012). As an invited speaker, he addressed the 10th World Wilderness Congress (Spain, 2013), International Association of Landscape Ecology World Congress (USA, 2015), Banff International Research Station fire management workshop (Canada, 2017), International Workshop of Fire Ecology (China, 2019), and US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine workshop on greenhouse gas emissions from wildland fires (2023). His influential publications include 'Fire management for biodiversity conservation: key research questions and our capacity to answer them' (2010, Biological Conservation), 'The worldwide “wildfire” problem' (2013, Ecological Applications), 'Fire regimes of Australia: a pyrogeographic model system' (2013, Journal of Biogeography), 'Land management practices associated with house loss in wildfires' (2012, PLOS ONE), and recent works such as 'Spatial metrics in fire ecology: seeking consistency amidst complexity' (2026, Biological Reviews) and 'Plant Responses to a Re-emergence of Cultural Burning in Long-Unburnt, Threatened Temperate Woodlands' (2025, Global Change Biology). Cary serves on the Editorial Advisory Committee of the International Journal of Wildland Fire (since 2009) and was Associate Editor from 2002 to 2023. He participates in the Fenner School Executive Committee, College of Systems and Society research committee, and has served on various advisory groups including the NSW Parks & Wildlife Advisory Council and ANU committees on workplace health and safety fieldwork and statistical consulting.