Researcher biography
I completed a Bachelor of Science in Ecology at The University of Queensland in 2015, followed by an Honours research project in 2016 supervised by Hugh Possingham (CBCS), Justine Shaw (AAD), and Rachael Alderman (Tasmanian Government). For this project, I integrated over two decades of tracking data for the threatened shy albatross (Thalassarche cauta) to increase return-on-investment and extract useful information for marine conservation and management.
I then travelled south to continue researching the shy albatross and embarked on a PhD at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (University of Tasmania) that I submitted in June 2022. My project explored the influences of climate variability and change on shy albatross to inform climate adaptation strategies for their conservation.
I am now a postdoctoral research fellow at CSIRO. I am developing climate adaptation decision-support tools for threatened species and protected places in Australia as part of a NESP Climate Systems Hub project led by Alistair Hobday.
Publications
Mason, C., Alderman, R., McGowan, J., Possingham, H. P., Hobday, A. J., Sumner, M., & Shaw, J. (2018). Telemetry reveals existing marine protected areas are worse than random for protecting the foraging habitat of threatened shy albatross (Thalassarche cauta). Diversity and Distributions, 24(12), 1744-1755. https://doi.org/10.1111/ddi.12830
Beger, M., Wendt, H., Sullivan, J., Mason, C., LeGrand, J., Davey, K., Jupiter, S., Ceccarelli, D. M., Dempsey, A., Edgar, G., Feary, D. A., Fenner, D., Gauna, M., Grice, H., Kirmani, S. N., Mangubhai, S., Purkis, S., Richards, Z. T., Rotjan, R., Stuart-Smith, R., Sykes, H., Yakub, N., Bauman, A.G., Hughes, A., Raubani, J., Lewis, A., & Fernandes, L. (2020). National-scale marine bioregions for the Southwest Pacific. Marine Pollution Bulletin, 150, 110710. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.MARPOLBUL.2019.110710
Mason, C., Hobday, A. J., Alderman, R., & Lea, M. A. (2021). Climate adaptation interventions for iconic fauna. Conservation Science and Practice, 3(7), e434. https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.434