The Ecological Society of Australia congratulates Professor Richard Kingsford on being awarded the 2021 ESA Gold Medal. Professor Kingsford is the Director of the Centre for Ecosystem Science at UNSW Sydney. He is a river ecologist and conservation biologist who has worked extensively across the wetlands and rivers of the Murray-Darling and Lake Eyre Basins.

Professor Kingsford originally planned to be a farmer after he finished his science degree.

“I wasn’t a star student at Uni partly because I spent too much time playing sport and I didn’t get the ecology passion until later,” he said.

“I went through a circuitous route to a PhD by completing it part time while managing a farm. I’ve always been interested in birds and worked on my PhD on wood ducks while I was mustering sheep and calving cows.”

This interest has led to a career partly focused on waterbirds and their dynamics in wetlands, including tracking changes over time in different wetland ecosystems and linking this to drivers of natural and human disturbances to river flows and flooding patterns. This work has informed his leadership of the Eastern Australian Waterbird Survey, which has been running since 1983 and covers about a third of the continent, making it one of the longest and most extensive surveys of ecosystems in the world. The data from this project are now part of State of Environment reporting at State and national levels and also form the basis of environmental objectives for the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, one of Australia’s most significant restoration initiatives.

Working in his early career at the NSW National Parks Service made Professor Kingsford think more deeply about the role of government in finding solutions to the environmental impacts we are causing.

“It triggered a major change in my focus from waterbird ecology to the threats,” said Professor Kingsford.

“Waterbirds are fascinating and I could spend three lifetimes working on their intrinsic ecology but I realised they were declining and I needed to focus on threats to their existence, mainly from humans, so that others could enjoy them in their lifetimes too.”

Since then, Richard Kingsford has made a significant contribution to understanding the impact of water resource developments on rivers and wetlands and their dependent ecosystem services around the world. Most recently, this included his team’s work on the impacts of dams on platypus, which has resulted in a submission for threatened species status for this iconic species. Further, he has invested time in the reintroduction of locally extinct mammals into Sturt National Park, in his role as leader of the Wild Deserts project. This decade-long project in north-western NSW has already returned three of an intended seven species of locally extinct mammals but importantly, has adopted a scientific approach linking understanding to management.

“This is a wonderful opportunity to show how science is essential for making good decisions,” said Professor Kingsford.

“I’m really interested in the fundamental management process and how we can improve that.”

“One of the important things for us as ecologists, and it can be scary, is to talk about results and implications and to inform the public. We often wrongly assume that people understand what we do but there’s a large proportion that only see it on the TV or in the newspaper so it’s really critical to get the message out not only about the science and why it’s important, but also how the solutions can inform policy and decision making so we can all continue to enjoy our environment.”

Among other appointments, Professor Kingsford was a member of the Lake Eyre Basin Scientific Advisory Panel and the NSW Biodiversity Conservation Advisory Panel. He has been involved with the Society for Conservation Biology in Oceania (SCBO) for more than two decades, including a term as President, and is currently the Chair of the SCB (Global) Governance committee. He is a member of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) World Commission on Protected Areas and is also a member of the IUCN special taskforce on water management for protected areas.

Professor Kingsford’s work has been awarded Eureka and Banksia Awards and earned him Fellowships of both the Royal Society of NSW and the Australian Zoological Society.