Michael McCarthy

Professor Michael McCarthy is a Professor in the School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences within the Faculty of Science at the University of Melbourne. He obtained his PhD and Bachelor of Science with Honours from the University of Melbourne. His academic interests center on quantitative ecology, encompassing Bayesian methods for ecological analysis, modeling population dynamics, extinction risk assessment, fire ecology, detection and management of invasive and rare species, synthesis of ecological data, development of ecological indices, and environmental risk assessment. McCarthy applies these approaches to enhance decision-making in conservation and environmental management. He coordinates aspects of the Environmental Science specialization in the Master of Environmental Science program.

McCarthy's career includes post-doctoral fellowships at the Australian National University, the University of Adelaide, and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He previously served at the Australian Research Centre for Urban Ecology, progressed to Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne from 2007 to 2013, and now holds a full professorship. He was Deputy Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions and a leading researcher in the National Environmental Research Program Environmental Decisions Hub. As a principal researcher in the Quantitative and Applied Ecology Group, he contributes to advancing applied ecology. In 2008, he received the Fenner Medal from the Australian Academy of Science. Key publications include his book Bayesian Methods for Ecology (Cambridge University Press, 2007; translated into Japanese in 2009), co-editorship of Species Conservation and Management: Case Studies (Oxford University Press, 2004), and Wildlife, Fire & Future Climate: A Forest Ecosystem Analysis (CSIRO Publishing, 2002). Highly cited works feature Redefine statistical significance (Nature Human Behaviour, 2018), Is my species distribution model fit for purpose? (Global Ecology and Biogeography, 2015), Understanding co-occurrence by modelling species simultaneously with a Joint Species Distribution Model (Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 2014), Scientific foundations for an IUCN Red List of Ecosystems (PLoS ONE, 2013), and Fire and biodiversity in the Anthropocene (Science, 2020). With over 20,000 citations, his contributions have profoundly influenced quantitative methods in ecology and conservation biology.

Professional Email: mamcca@unimelb.edu.au