Laurence is a PhD student in the Conservation and Landscape Ecology group at the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University. He studies the ecology of fire refuges in the Mountain Ash forests of the Victorian Central Highlands. Fire refuges are areas in the landscape that have locally different fire regimes than those prevailing in the landscape. The availability of mature habitat structures and features in these refuges is thought to facilitate the persistence of species unable to survive in severely burnt forest. Laurence’s research has an explicit spatial focus; he has a particular interest in how the spatial arrangement of habitat elements following fire influences the distribution, persistence and recovery of species at different scales. He is also interested in the interface between science and land management and the process of how research findings translate into successful practice and policy. Laurence’s work is funded through the NERP Environmental Decision Hub and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions. He has previously worked on bird responses to fire-induced fragmentation in the semi-arid Mallee woodland ecosystems of South Australia and on assessing the health of River Red Gum communities in the floodplain ecosystems of the lower Murray-Darling Basin.