Shawkat Sohel is a Research Fellow at the School of Science, Technology, and Engineering. He has a wide-ranging research focus encompassing forest-water interaction, the effects of disturbances on forest and aquatic ecosystems, agroforestry systems, community-based forest management, carbon cycling, restoration ecology, and ecosystem services. He is currently engaged in the Forest Restoration and Climate Experiment (FoRCE) project. This research project will utilise vegetation plot data together with other available remote sensing data to analyse and model the dynamic interplay between trees, lianas, climate factors, and human disturbances, aiming to understand the global and regional impacts on forest biomass and successional pathways. Before his tenure at UniSC, Shawkat was actively teaching within the Department of Environmental Science and Management at North South University (NSU) in Bangladesh.
Research interest:
- Socio-ecological system analysis
- Ecohydrology (Hydrological modeling; forest water use)
- Ecosystem service quantification and mapping
- Stable isotopes in Ecology
- Habitat suitability modelling
- Species distribution modelling
- Remote sensing application in ecology
- Carbon storage dynamics
- Forest disturbance and recovery
Awards and Membership
- IPRS, UQ for PhD
- Erasmus Mundus fund for MSc in Ecohydrology
- SAFS RHD Travel Award, The University of Queensland, Australia
- Research Grant from WET TROPICS management Authority.
- HILIP, LGED (Bangladesh) fund to examining the Ecological Dynamics of Reforestation at Landscape Level for Strengthening Resilience
- Developing competence in systematic reviews and meta-analysis of archival/historical accounts of urban forestry in Bangladesh. Funding agency – Compass Program, U.S. Forest Service.
- Member of British Ecological Society