Research Fellow. Fire ecology, fire and carbon landscape, simulation modeling, climate change. Fenner School of Environment and Society. (College of Medicine, Biology and Environment).

Professional Background

In 1991 Karen King graduated with a Bachelor of Applied Science in Medical Laboratory Science from the University of Canberra. From 1991-2000 she worked as a Technical Officer with the Developmental Physiology Group at the John Curtin School of Medical Research, ANU. Karen graduated with a graduate Diploma in Resource and Environmental Science at ANU in 2000. In February, 2004, she completed a PhD at ANU titled 'Simulating the effects of anthropogenic burning on patterns of biodiversity'. She has completed a three year Postdoctoral Position with the Bushfire CRC, and an eighteen month Postdoctoral Position with the Australian Greenhouse Office.

Research and Teaching Interests

For the last couple of years I have been working on developing and implementing a landscape fire regime and carbon dynamics model. This work was initially funded by the Australian Greenhouse Office, and is now funded by the Department of Climate Change. The developed model incorporates both the landscape fire regime simulator FIRESCAPE, and the forest carbon accounting model FullCAM. This model is currently being used to investigate the impacts of a range of management and climate change scenarios on fire and carbon dynamics for a 2 million hectare study region in the high country of south eastern Australia. Outputs from this model provide useful insights into the potential implications of climate change on fire regimes for this region and demonstrate the consequential implications for carbon stocks and vegetation dynamics. Further, these outputs will inform the National Carbon Accounting System (NCAS) as well as land managers.

Notable Publications

King KJ, Bradstock RA, Cary GJ, Chapman J, and Marsden-Smedley JB (2008) The relative importance of fine scale fuel mosaics on reducing fire risk in south west Tasmania, Australia. International Journal of Wildland Fire, 17(3) 421-430.

King, KJ (2008) The relative importance of 'fine scale fuel mosaics' in reducing fire risk in southwest Tasmania, Australia. Buttongrass Moorland Management Conference Proceedings Australasian Plant Conservation. 16(3) 8-10.

King KJ, Cary GJ, Bradstock RA, Chapman J, Pyrke A and Marsden-Smedley JB 2006. Simulation of prescribed burning strategies in south-west Tasmania, Australia: effects on unplanned fires, fire regimes, and ecological management values. International Journal of Wildland Fire, 15(4) 527?540.

King KJ, Chapman J 2006. Using statistics to determine the effectiveness of prescribed burning. In Brown P, Liu S, Sharma, D (Eds) Contributions to Probability and Statistics - Applications and Challenges. Proceedings of the International Statistics Workshop. (World Scientific: Singapore)