Sam Banks^1,2, David Lindenmayer¹, Lachlan McBurney¹, Elle Bowd¹ and the Conservation and Landscape Ecology Research Group^1
1Australian National University ²Charles Darwin University

The Australian forest ecology community lost one of its most passionate and respected scientists recently, when Dr David Blair tragically passed away after a skiing accident on Victoria’s Mount Bogong. He was husband to Sera Blair and father to Leo and Jasper.

David Blair had been a forest scientist at the Australian National University (ANU) for the past decade. He joined the Fenner School of Environment & Society as a research officer studying the recovery of Victoria’s mountain ash forests after the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. He was an excellent botanist and was soon leading research into vegetation community responses to fire and logging, for which he was awarded a PhD a month before he passed away. Over the time he was at the ANU, he generously mentored and supported researchers and PhD students, and would enthusiastically guide visiting politicians, scientists and members of the public through the forests to share his knowledge and passion.

Credit: Sam Banks

The research that David Blair conducted on the impacts of disturbance on vegetation communities of mountain ash forests filled a major gap in a well-studied ecosystem and offered new insights into forest disturbance ecology. His work showed how the diverse functional traits of plants affect their sensitivity to different physical disturbance processes. Before his research, much of the literature from this ecosystem had ignored plant communities other than mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans) itself.

Dave and his wife Sera were passionate about the conservation of Victoria’s mountain ash forests. They played instrumental leadership roles in community groups such as Friends of Leadbeater’s Possum, inspiring a new wave of citizen-scientists and nature enthusiasts across Victoria. As a scientist, he contributed immensely to the monitoring of this Critically Endangered species, in particular our understanding of the effects of forest management on its limiting resources. He also helped develop evidence-based recommendations to help conserve the species, including through a key role in the Forest Stewardship Council.

To those of us who worked with him, Dave’s knowledge of Victoria’s mountain ash forests was humbling and inspiring. Contemporary academia tends to reward generic and global views of ecology and conservation science, yet Dave repeatedly showed us the scientific value of a deep understanding of a place. Dave could read the mountain ash forest like a book and he lifted the work of those of us around him with his rigour, his attention to detail and his pure enthusiasm.

Dave was an avid bushwalker, climber and skier, and a brilliant photographer whose beautiful images formed the core of two books on mountain ash forest ecology. Those of us who worked with him are incredibly proud and privileged to have done so and remain inspired by the passion and rigour that he brought to his work. The conservation science legacy of Dr David Blair will live on through the extensive data sets he painstakingly collected, his valiant contributions to forest ecology and policy, and in everyone who knew him.

Read the rest of the September 2019 ESA Bulletin.