BAAM STAFF

Dr John Stanisic (Director)

Dr John Stanisic is Curator and Biodiversity Scientist at the Queensland Centre for Biodiversity, Queensland Museum. He is Australia's foremost expert on land snails. John gained his PhD at the University of Queensland with a thesis on minute rainforest snails and has written a number of publications on the systematics and biogeography of land snails. His research interests are the distribution and documentation of land snails in eastern Australia and their potential use as indicators in land management. His work has been applied to many biodiversity assessment projects.

John has considerable field experience and over the past 25 years has surveyed more than 2000 sites from the islands of the Torres Strait to far southern New South Wales. Consequently, the Queensland Museum now holds Australia's most significant land snail collection.

John is also a very experienced invertebrate consultant, undertaking work covering most invertebrate phyla. He has undertaken faunal consultancies for the Wet Tropics Management Authority, Department of Agriculture Fisheries and Forestry-Australia (AFFA), Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service, Kuku Djungan Aboriginal Corporation and the Queensland Department of Natural Resources, as well as for a range of consulting firms throughout Queensland and New South Wales.

Invertebrates are a largely untapped source of fine-grain information for use in environmental assessment. Their vital role in determining the quality of aquatic habitats has gained almost universal acceptance but their use in land based fauna surveys is still in its infancy. Expert identification, underpinned by sound field knowledge and a comprehensive specimen database now allow this group of organisms to make a substantial contribution to environmental impact assessment.