Dr Rebecca West

I live and work in the arid zone of Australia, raising my young family at the Wild Deserts field station in Sturt National Park, far-west NSW. My research is strongly applied focusing on the fields of translocation and restoration ecology. I completed my PhD in 2014, examining the use of adaptive management in translocated rock-wallaby populations. I began working for UNSW following my PhD as a Research Assistant on an ARC Linkage Project based in remote South Australia. This research project made significant contributions to the field of translocation ecology as it was the first project to demonstrate that exposing native translocated species to low densities of feral predators (in situ predator exposure) could result in improved predator awareness and thus increase the chances of successful translocations to predator environments. In 2016 I joined the new UNSW Sydney Wild Deserts project as their ecologist and worked to build this project from the ground up, living at the very remote project site since 2017. I secured my first academic position with UNSW as the Wild Deserts Principal Ecologist Postdoctoral Fellow in June 2022. The Wild Deserts project is a partnership with the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service and aims to restore a large area of arid desert. Over the past 9 years the project has flourished with six mammals that were once locally extinct now returned to the desert which is triggering a cascade of ecosystem changes.