Professor Pam Dyer
BA(Hons) Qld., PhD Qld., GradCertEnvMan Qld., ASDA
Position: Dean and Professor, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Office: Office of the Dean, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Tel: +61 7 5430 1242
Email: dyer@usc.edu.au
Teaching areas
- Environmental and Planning Studies
Research areas
- Ecology of Wedge-Tailed Shearwaters
- Natural resource management and planning
- Eco-tourism and interpretation
- Human interaction with the natural environment
Profile
Professor Pam Dyer has research interests and successes in fields that range from avian ecology to community involvement in, and concern for, built and natural environments. More recently her teaching topics have covered sustainability and interpretation in tourism and, not surprisingly for a region like the Sunshine Coast, she attracts more research students in the tourism field than for avian ecology, the topic of her PhD.
For her PhD, Dr Dyer developed a "burrowscope" that enables non-intrusive inspection of the contents of bird burrows up to three metres in length. At the time this was an innovative development but today has become a commonly used tool for monitoring the contents of burrowing species in Australia and overseas.
From her research into the breeding status of Shearwater burrows Dr Dyer found that approximately 50 percent of those burrows that were thought to contain breeding birds were, in fact, unoccupied, thus placing doubt on the validity of all previous population estimates for burrowing seabird species. She has worked closely with colleagues from the Raine Island Corporation, other universities and Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service to lay the foundation for a monitoring program for Shearwaters on islands of the Great Barrier Reef.
Her active community involvement has resulted in a Rotary funded project investigating community awareness and preparedness for natural hazards and disaster response on the Sunshine Coast. These interests found Dr Dyer spending the first half of 2002 in Springfield Missouri where, in cooperation with Southwest Missouri State University, she investigated community stakeholders' perspectives of environmental management issues in tourism at three major reservoirs in the western Ozarks region. She is currently working with others to expand this interest in community engagement with natural resource management.
Professional memberships
- Environment Institute of Australia
- Ecotourism Association of Australia
- Interpretation Australia Association
- International Association for the Study of Common Property
- Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union
- Australian Bird Study Association
Publications
Many of Professor Pam Dyer's publications are available from the USC Coast Research Database.
Research grants
- USC Internal Seed Research Grants Scheme (principal researcher) - Resident perceptions of tourism and associated development on the Sunshine Coast (co-researching with Business Faculties at USC and Washington State University), 2004.
- FASS Internal Research Grant: Interdisciplinary Research (principal researcher) - Resident perceptions of tourism and associated development on the Sunshine Coast (co-researching with Business Faculties at USC and Washington State University), 2004.
- USC Internal Research Grants Scheme (co-researcher) - GIS modelling of raptor habitat: a scoping study on the Sunshine Coast (J.Carter - principal researcher), 2004.
- South-western Missouri State University: Sometime Cities: Managing and planning for the environmental issues of the Seasonal Lakeshore City - Prof. James Skinner (with Pam Dyer and Sonya Glavac as adjunct researchers), 2002.
- FASS Internal Research Grant (principal researcher) - Wedge-tailed Shearwater burrow censuses for nine Capricorn Group Islands for a five-year period, 1996 to 2000 (co-researching with QPWS and Griffith University), 2002.
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