Leon A Barmuta Australian Freshwater Sciences Society Conference 2018

Leon A Barmuta

I started in freshwater research in 1978 watching leaf packs rot at the University of Adelaide. After a stint writing management plans for NPWS SA, I completed a PhD at Monash supervised by P.S. ‘Sam’ Lake which exposed me to rather more diversity (of macroninvertebrates) than I’d bargained for. With my head still swimming with morphological differences between larval chironomids, I subbed for Richard Norris’s teaching role at the then Canberra CAE, before working with Jenny Davis at Murdoch on pre-impact monitoring surveys. Somehow this made me attractive to the University of California at Santa Barbara (acid rain in lakes and streams), after which I fell into threatened species policy in Victoria, more bug stuff at the Museum of Victoria, post-doc at Monash (near-bed fluid mechanics) before starting a lectureship at the University of Tasmania in 1991. All along I’ve been interested in far too many things, but three themes of research have sustained me: how habitat mediates biological interactions; better designs for monitoring and assessment of human impacts on fresh waters using biota; and, how do processes in variable systems like lakes and streams ‘work’? I confess to being a statistics tragic, a recovered bird twitcher and besotted by my children. In spite of all this, I was awarded a national teaching citation in 2013 and ASL chose to honour me with its medal. I am humbled. Thank you. It’s been a wild ride, and there’s lots more to come. I am looking forward to it.