North Barker Personnel

The senior consultants of North Barker - Ecosystem Services have completed many hundreds of projects in Tasmania over more than 15 years for a diverse range of clients including government, industry, business and community and private interests.

North Barker employ a team of highly regarded ecologists and specialist wildlife biologists so that we can provide the best advice available. We prepare Forest Practices Plans with specific expertise to deal with those outside of the forest industry eg for residential development and farm dams.

We have an advanced level of GIS capability utilising Mapinfo. We are one of the largest users of GIS in Tasmania and produce clear, useful maps that support the planning process. All of our data is managed through strict metadata protocols.

Andrew North has a BSc (hons) in Biology, with a background in land management., Andrew has been operating as a consultant ecologist in Tasmania since 1991. He has personally conducted and reported over two hundred studies for various Government Departments and consultants throughout Tasmania. He specialises in assessing botanical conservation values, development proposal impacts upon native vegetation and monitoring of site rehabilitation.

Andrew has six years hands-on experience in the UK employed in habitat management, balancing nature conservation with public use for recreation and education. He has compiled, promoted and implemented management plans for Nature Reserves, Conservation Areas and Forest Reserves. He has extensive experience of the planning approvals process in Tasmania and is a clever and valuable advocate. His field based plant identification skills are highly regarded amongst his peers.

Philip Barker holds a PhD in ecology with a similar amount of Tasmanian and Australian experience. Philip hails from an established scientific background having been previously employed with Forestry Tasmania and DPIWE before joining North in 1999. He is mainly occupied with ecological studies, monitoring and strategic planning as well as the management of threatened species.

Philip is also expert in the management and control of Phytophthora, the infamous root rot fungus. In the reconciliation of conservation and development he is highly regarded as a professional and motivated problem solver who gets outcomes.

David Ziegeler is a naturalist who has over 20 years experience in vegetation survey work. He has worked on major projects including a comprehensive survey of weed infestation in Tasmanian World Heritage Area for the former Parks and Wildlife Service. Another major project was the production of an atlas of native Tasmanian orchid distribution for the Service which provided the basis for the land mark book “The Orchids of Tasmania”.

He has also been involved in numerous vegetation surveys for Forestry Tasmania and DPIW, and with the Warra Long Term Monitoring Project. He has a broad interest in the natural history of Tasmania and is highly experienced in identification of flora and fauna, as well as vegetation types and ecological processes. David was the first to discover the moss froglet and his contribution to the Tasmanian orchid flora has been recognised in the naming of Pterostylis ziegeleri.

Karen Ziegler has a strong technical and academic background in conservation, forestry and land management. Karen holds a BSc in life and earth sciences with a major in botany.

She is also a Forest Practices Officer with a specialty of working in land clearance not usually associated with commercial forestry, eg. dams, irrigation, mining and infrastructure. She has worked extensively in assessment of conservation values in particular botany but including threatened fauna habitat, geomorphology, archaeology and soil and water values.

She provides management recommendations often in collaboration with other land managers or land owners. Karen has a passion for offshore islands and has coordinated several weed control programs in the Furneaux, Kent and Maatsuyker group of islands, including logistics and on ground works. She has a thorough grounding in conservation in production environments as well as in areas managed primarily for conservation.

Susan Jungalwalla provides data management and GIS support to the group. She has a BSc in Applied Maths & Information Science with experience in systems design, computer programming, biometric modelling, and database design.

Her more recent qualification, a Graduate Diploma in Information Systems (1999), has focussed her expertise on geographic information systems. After working with the School of Geography at the University of Tasmania, on the development of a combined geological and structural GIS data set of South China, Susan joined North Barker where she has gained considerable experience in the capture, integration, analysis, management and presentation of data from varied sources and formats.

She is motivated by professional challenges, and fuelled by good coffee!

Cassandra Strain is a naturalist experienced in identifying land values, originally as a property valuer and now as an environmental consultant. She has a BAppSc in Property Economics and a Park Management Diploma.

Cassie is experienced in vegetation surveys, vegetation community mapping, threatened flora research, weed mapping and vegetation condition assessment. Recent projects include Vegetation Condition and Benchmarking Project for DPIW and the Coastal Values Project; mapping coastal vegetation, weeds and condition along much of the east coast of Tasmania from Cockle Creek to Weymouth.