Dr. Diana Kuchinke
Scholarly Teacher Fellow, Environmental Science
Diana is a fire ecologist with broad interests in conservation ecology, climate change drivers and impacts, and bird responses to landscape disturbance. For her PhD, Diana investigated bird responses to fire in terms of fire frequency, severity and time-since-fire. She modelled responses by entire bird communities, foraging guilds and individual species. Diana currently teaches in Shijiazhuang, China as well as at Federation University in Victoria. Her office is at Mt Helen campus. Diana’s current research projects include: creating a management framework for the timing of prescribed burns that considers climate drivers of varying time-scales as well as on-off ‘switches’ that trigger fire; working on the climate change predictions across a polluted water catchment area in the Hebei Province, China. With collaborators from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing and Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology, Seoul, Diana is also working on a project investigating whether common bird species of the Asia-Pacific region, with high cognitive abilities and social development, can buffer the effects of climate change.
Diana has a passion for helping future ecologists achieve their goals and she currently holds the Honorary position of Vice-President Next Generation, for the Ecological Society of Australia.
Animal population decline and recovery after severe fire: Relating ecological and life history traits with expert estimates of population impacts from the Australian 2019-20 megafires
Fire responses by bird guilds and species in heathy dry forests in central Victoria, Australia
The conservation impacts of ecological disturbance: Time-bound estimates of population loss and recovery for fauna affected by the 2019–2020 Australian megafires
Prescribed burn severity has minimal effect on common bird species in a fire-prone forest ecosystem
Prescribed burning is widely used to mitigate the effects of severe fires across the landscape...