Dr Payal Bal

Payal Bal is currently based at the Quantitative and Applied Ecology Group at The University of Melbourne, where she works on developing models to assess the global impacts of socioeconomic trends on biodiversity and on assessing the national-level impacts of bushfires on Australian invertebrate species. During her doctoral research at The University of Queensland, she applied decision analysis and structured decision-making approaches to evaluate monitoring strategies for conservation. She has previously worked on modelling spatial vegetation patterns to develop indicators of ecosystem collapse; on developing methods of abundance estimation for biodiversity from distance sampling; and on studying the human–elephant conflict in India.