Derek Eamus

In 1984 I finished my PhD after three years of study (well, occasionally studying) in Bangor, North Wales, where my love of motorcycles was severely tested by the weather. Following completion of the PhD I went to Liverpool to study wood rotting Basidiomycete fungi. Sadly on my first day there my beautiful Suzuki GS550 was nicked. It was downhill from there for Liverpool.

From Liverpool I went to Fiji for my first lectureship at the new University of the South Pacific. No motorcycles there unfortunately. Following the birth of my daughter Maya and and two military coups (I don't think the events were linked) I returned to the UK to work on physiological responses of trees to acid rain, ozone and atmospheric CO2 concentration. I also bought a Laverda 500 race-tuned bike, which whilst immensely popular with me, wasn't so popular with the neighbours as it could be heard coming from at least 5 miles away.

From Edinburgh it was a short hop and skip to join the new Northern Territory University in Darwin, tropical Australia. Here I worked on the carbon and water relations of the pristine savannas of north Australia. I established the first eddy covariance tower in Australia at a site a few miles out of Darwin.

Ten years and three motorcycles later, I moved to Sydney to take up the position of Professor of Environmental Sciences. It was here that I came to realise that to fully understand the ecophysiology of terrestrial landscapes we needed to include data and insights gained from remote sensing and modelling. In 2011 I and my co-authors Professors Alfredo Huete and Qiang Yu decided to write a single text that would integrate the three disciplines of plant ecophysiology, remote sensing and modelling. This text has now recently (March 2016) been published by Cambridge University Press.