Dr Darren Giling is a Research Fellow in Quantitative Ecology in the Institute for Applied Ecology at the University of Canberra and CSIRO Land and Water. Darren is an ecosystem and community ecologist with broad interests in the relationships between biodiversity, food-web structure, and the functioning of ecosystems.

Darren’s applied research seeks to understand how environmental changes and management decisions influence freshwater, riparian, and floodplain habitats. He studies how land-use and climate change affect biological community structure and organic matter storage and dynamics in river and lakes. For instance, his work has shown that replanting native riparian vegetation along Australian agricultural streams improves stream health by restoring links between the terrestrial and aquatic environment. He has also used lake enclosures to experimentally demonstrate how extreme storms can induce algal blooms that drastically increase rates of lake primary production and respiration.

Darren is currently working with a range of stakeholders in the Murray-Darling Basin to develop models for predicting how environmental flows influence the functioning of river ecosystems at broad spatial scales.