School of Earth and Environment

I am an Assistant Lecturer at the School of Earth and Environment of the University of Canterbury. I teach remote sensing for Earth observation and geospatial analysis using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and multispectral optical imagery. My research involves radar signal processing for Earth observation and biological applications and radar instrumentation.

Applications of Social Ecological Systems theory and methods in the Disaster Risk Governance context. The active management of tensions endemic to cross-sector collaborations in disaster risk management, response and recovery contexts, with a special interest in the use of boundary organizations and collaborative governance to manage institutional misalignments between scientific and other domains. The use of collaborative governance arrangements to improve the research quality and relevance of national research funding programs, and - in response and recovery environments - to enhance cross-sector coordination and decrease ethical risks to impacted communities. Community resilience to natural hazards.

I am a Lecturer in Active Tectonics and Geomorphology. My research focuses on understanding how tectonic deformation, surface processes and climate interact to drive mountain building and landscape evolution.

I specialise in trapped-charge thermochronometry, using luminescence (OSL and IRSL) and electron spin resonance (ESR) to investigate shallow, Quaternary-scale cooling and exhumation. I combine these approaches with geomorphology and numerical modelling to link fault activity and earthquake cycles with longer-term mountain building.

My research has focused on active orogenic systems including the Himalayas, and I am now developing this work in Aotearoa New Zealand, with a particular focus on the Southern Alps and Alpine Fault.

Professor Anne-Marie Brady FRSNZ is a specialist on the Chinese Communist Party (domestic politics and foreign policy), polar politics, Pacific politics, and New Zealand foreign policy. She is a fluent Mandarin Chinese speaker. She is founding and executive editor of The Polar Journal (Taylor and Francis Publishers). She has published ten books and over fifty sole-authored scholarly papers. She has written more than 60 opeds on her research for newspapers such as the New York Times, The Guardian, The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, The Financial Times, The Diplomat. In addition to her duties at the University of Canterbury, Professor Brady holds a number of honorary roles. She was a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington DC from 2014 to 2025. In 2014 she was appointed to a two-year term on the World Economic Forum's Global Action Council on the Arctic. She is an advisor to the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC). 

Professor Brady's books include Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), Looking North, Looking South: China, Taiwan and the South Pacific (World Scientific, 2010); China's Thought Management (Routledge, 2012), The Emerging Politics of Antarctica (Routledge, 2013), China as a Polar Great Power (Cambridge University Press and Wilson Press, 2017), and Small States and the Changing Global Order: New Zealand Faces the Future (Springer, 2019). Her 2017 conference paper 'Magic Weapons: China's foreign influence activities under Xi Jinping' helped to spark a global conversation on China's foreign interference and espionage activities, as well as legislative change. Professor Brady's groundbreaking, policy-relevant, research demonstrates the important role of the academic as "critic and conscience" in a modern democracy. 

My research focuses on the links between the Earth’s surface morphology and the physical processes that shape it. This relationship is two way, as topography exerts a primary control on the distribution and intensity of geophysical flows which in turn, shape our landscapes through erosion and sedimentation. I am fortunate to be working on this theme now as the geosciences undergo a technological revolution that is transforming the measurement of topography. This step-change is driven by the emergence of new Earth observation platforms and sensors, in particular airborne and terrestrial laser scanners and methods to model landforms in three dimensions from ground-based, aerial and satellite imagery. Datasets which capture the geometry of integrated landscapes, built upwards from their particle scale building blocks, are fast becoming a reality.

This data revolution has far reaching consequences, offering insights into the scaling of topography, non-invasive methods to quantify landscape form across multiple spatial scales and a framework to measure 3D change and sediment budgets robustly. Perhaps more fundamentally, these data offer new opportunities to develop novel tools to parameterize and test numerical models in order to better predict the dynamics of the key geophysical flows which both supply and threaten our growing populations.

Professor Ann Brower is a specialist in environmental science whose work examines how decisions, institutions, policies, and regulatory frameworks shape the stewardship of land, water, biodiversity, and natural resources. She is known for science-led legislative changes to the Building Act, the Resource Management Act, and the Crown Pastoral Land Act.  Her work has meaningful impact from city centres to the remotest high-country landscapes of Aotearoa.

Her research analyses how laws and policies influence land‑use outcomes, ecological protection, and the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. She works across physical geography, environmental science, economics, policy, governance, and the law, evaluating the effectiveness of regulatory frameworks and governance arrangements in achieving sustainable and equitable outcomes. Her scholarship informs national and regional debates on conservation management, resource governance, and institutional reform, contributing evidence‑based legislative reform that support more resilient and just environmental systems.

In addition to science-informed law changes to 3 laws with extensive geographic impact, she works with consulting clients to create meaningful change on the ground.  She has done consulting work for Canterbury, Southland, Otago, and Waikato Regional Councils as well as Ministry for the Environment.

She has also contributed to environmental decision‑making as an expert witness, appearing several times in Environment Court proceedings and once in the High Court.

Head of the School of Social and Cultural Studies in Education and co-Director of Te Puna Rangahau i- Ako, the Digital Education Futures Lab at the University of Canterbury. I am a Commonwealth of Learning Chair with a research focus exploring (post)digital (in)equality in Tertiary Education with a particular focus on perspectives and opportunities in the Pacific region. 

Planetary scientist with a multi-disciplinary training in space mission operations, remote sensing, experimental project design & management, big data collection, processing & analysis. I did my doctoral research at the University of Bern (Switzerland) to study the Martian polar regions using high resolution images from the Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System (CaSSIS) camera onboard the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter and understand the origin of the seasonal spots, fans and araneiform structures. This was coupled to experimental work at the IceLab facility to recreate similar processes (formation of a thick translucent ice slab covering a dusty martian surface) and analyse the evolution of the spectophotometric properties during its formation and sublimation phases.

My current project at the GRI, and in collaboration with Earth Sciences New Zealand (ESNZ) and Ngāi Tahu Farms, is about developing a multi-scale, satellite-based framework for estimating agricultural methane emissions in Aotearoa New Zealand's pastoral systems. This integrated framework help explore what satellite-based monitoring can realistically contribute to verifying and complementing traditional agricultural emissions inventories, with direct relevance to climate policy and emissions reporting. Three main components of this framework are :

• Bottom-up farm inventory pipeline, implementing IPCC Tier 1, Tier 2 Simplified, Tier 2 Advanced, and the New Zealand Ministry for Primary Industries' Farm Emissions Method (FEM), allowing emissions to be estimated and compared across methodologies at weekly, monthly, and seasonal/annual scales.
• Top-down atmospheric inversion, developed in collaboration with ESNZ, drawing on TROPOMI satellite observations, fixed-station insitu measurements, and the UK Met Office's NAME III Lagrangian particle dispersion model.
• Remote sensing proxies, using PlanetScope satellite imagery to derive vegetation indices as a spatial proxy for pasture biomass, calibrated against ground-truth rising plate meter (RPM) measurements using machine learning. 

My work focuses on the creation and erosion of wellbeing in places. I have examined processes and events that contribute to lived experiences of distress and difficulty in a number of towns, cities and regions in New Zealand and the UK, while also working to identify the collaborations, policies and practices able to facilitate wellbeing within them. 

My early research considered rural and urban places disrupted by economic restructuring and neoliberal welfare reform, while more recent projects have focused on disaster-affected places. When examining these variously disrupted environments, I have investigated the spaces and settings within them that people experience as supportive, enabling and therapeutic and even, on occasion, as transformative. Empirical investigations in this regard have encompassed community drop-in centres, retreat centres, respite care agencies, residential care facilities, and urban community farms.  

I am currently an Associate Editor for Health & Place and the New Zealand Geographer, and an editorial board member for Social & Cultural Geography; Emotion, Space & Society; and the Australasian Journal of Disaster & Trauma Studies. 

My research centres around interactions between human mobility, accessibility and wellbeing. These relationships are shaped by urban form, transport systems, community, and sociodemographics. I examine these dynamics using geospatial analysis, often drawing on crowdsourced smartphone data, mobile phone data, and other human movement information to gain insight.