Sam is a conservation biologist interested in how animals respond to environmental change. Sam is something of a details person and likes to find out about the processes operating in animal populations and how they respond to environmental changes caused by things like disturbance, habitat fragmentation or logging. He does a lot of field-based research, but often resorts to genetic methods to study the things that animals don't tell us in other ways. A current research focus is the interaction between environmental disturbance, population dynamics and genetic diversity. Disturbance is a key driver of population and community dynamics globally, but its effects on biodiversity at the genetic level are largely unappreciated. Chris also does research on methods for understanding population processes like dispersal from spatial genetic data. His projects are focused on tall eucalypt forests in the Victorian central highlands as well as NSW coastal heathland. Before moving to ANU I did a post-doc at Macquarie University on marine invertebrate population genetics, investigating links between ocean current circulation and population connectivity.