Barry Butler
Water Quality Scientist
Email: barry.butler@jcu.edu.au
Phone: 07 4781 4262
Location: DB19 107c
During the ten years prior to 1990, Barry was a chemist, chief chemist and then Manager of the North Queensland Branch of AMDEL, a national analytical laboratory and scientific consultancy group. In 1990 he joined the Australian Centre for Tropical Freshwater Research (ACTFR) and established facilities to provide a comprehensive water quality consultancy service to both researchers within the centre and external clients. This entailed the establishment of a new water analysis laboratory, the infrastructure required to implement field assessments, and a scientific team capable of providing professional advice on all aspects of the design, implementation and reporting of water quality programs.
Since then he has collaborated on all major ACTFR projects that included a water quality component, and has carried out numerous contract research and consultancy projects for government environmental agencies and resource managers, industry, and other commercial clients. He has also participated as a scientific advisor in many regional environmental management initiatives. Current examples include the Technical Advisory Panel for the Burdekin-Haughton Water Resource Plan and the Water Quality Technical Group which was recently formed to advise all regional NRM bodies in North Queensland and the GBR catchment. Barry has now spent 15 years working with an interdisciplinary research team engaged in investigations aimed at assisting regional resource managers to assess the condition of aquatic ecosystems, identify and prioritise environmental issues, and determine management strategies. This has provided a unique perspective on aquatic habitats in the north Queensland region, and the issues that affect them.
Barry's research over the past ten years has primarily been aimed at enhancing the capacity of water quality practitioners to better assess the significance of water quality as an integral component of regional aquatic ecosystems. This has required the implementation of applied research programs dealing with four key aspects of the interactions between water quality, aquatic ecosystems and anthropogenic pressures in this region: toxicological reviews and experiments to determine the water quality requirements and tolerances of local aquatic species; literature reviews and field investigations to determine the effects of natural and anthropogenic sources on contaminant inputs and fluxes; field monitoring and laboratory experiments to examine the effects of instream ecological and physical processes on water quality, and; field research to assess the ways in which anthropogenic pressures alter the responses of wetland ecosystems to water quality changes. Recently much effort has been directed at integrating the outputs of this work by developing water quality management and assessment guidelines and linking them to typology schemes in order to provide managers and water quality scientists with access to situation-specific advice for dealing with different kinds of wetland waters.
