Current Fellows

The Gottstein Trust receives many applications from highly qualified professionals and had great difficulty in selecting the Fellows who will be conducting their projects in the year 2010.

Gottstein Trust Fellowships James Bulinski will use his Fellowship to travel to the USA where he will investigate the rapidly-developing US carbon market, including existing voluntary markets and the emerging mandatory compliance market. An impetus for the project is the recent successful passage of the American Clean Energy & Security Act, potentially creating a substantial demand for Australian forest carbon. A key objective of the project is to identify practical pathways for Australian forest managers to take advantage of such opportunities.
Milos Ivkovic plans to visit the Genetic Improvement and Physiology of Forest Trees unit within the INRA laboratories and their field sites in France to address a range of issues in silviculture and wood quality relating to tree breeding. He will examine the effect of climate on tree ring wood properties, the effect of heatwaves on tree mortality and its correlation with ring width and/or density. He will also investigate genotype-by-growth season interactions and implications for genetic selection and plantation management, and the consequences for softwood plantation productivity and profitability.
Washington Gapare will travel to the USA to study advanced methods to control inbreeding in radiata pine plantations. He will visit CAMCORE at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC where he plans to set up a flexible method, Orchard Plan, that allocates individual genotypes in ex situ conservation plantations to minimise inbreeding. The Orchard Plan will have immediate applications in breeding, quality seed production, and the establishment of forest tree ex situ plantations.
Jim O'Hehir will travel to South Africa to study the latest developments in precision forestry globally. He will also address issues in timber resource management, specifically estate growth and yield regulation, including log product prediction, and review scientific and policy developments relating to plantations and water use. He will visit major South Africa forestry organisations to review the application of areas of major significance to the forest growing and processing industry in Australia.

World Forest Institute Fellowships

Sue Baker will undertake her WFI Fellowship in 2010. Her study project will be Variable Retention Silviculture, where she plans to compare biodiversity research management practices in Tasmania with those in the Pacific northwest of the USA. The primary objective of her project will be to gain a detailed understanding of biodiversity research, and adaptive management of operational Variable Retention practice, in the Pacific Northwest.