Australasian Mangrove and Saltmarsh Network Conference 2026

Dr Nathan Thomas

Nathan is a Remote Sensing scientist focused on the broad-scale mapping of forest characteristics. He investigates mangrove extent and structure at the global scale, with a current focus on mangrove forest functional traits and their role in the Blue Carbon cycle. Nathan earned his PhD in 2016 from Aberystwyth University under the supervision of Dr Pete Bunting, Dr Andy Hardy and Professor Richard Lucas. His methodology for global mangrove classification and change detection ultimately developed into the Global Mangrove Watch. While serving as a postdoc and research scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Nathan generated the first global map of mangrove height and biomass. He is currently a Senior Lecturer at Edge Hill University in the UK.  

Dr Havalend Steinmuller

Dr Havalend Steinmuller is an Assistant Professor at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON), where she leads the Coastal Biogeochemistry Laboratory. She earned her BS in Coastal Environmental Science (2013) and MS in Oceanography and Coastal Sciences (2015) from Louisiana State University, and her PhD in Conservation Biology (2019) from the University of Central Florida, where her dissertation examined the biogeochemical responses of coastal wetlands to sea-level-rise-induced transitions. 

Her research examines how carbon and nitrogen cycle through coastal wetlands, with a particular focus on the blue carbon dynamics of mangrove and salt marsh systems. Working along the northern Gulf of Mexico, one of the poleward frontiers of global mangrove distribution, she studies how Avicennia expansion into Spartina marsh is reshaping the biogeochemical processes that govern carbon storage, nutrient cycling, and greenhouse gas exchange. Her work spans scales, from field campaigns across Louisiana's deltaic wetlands and barrier islands to global syntheses that refine estimates of mangrove carbon and nitrogen burial across sedimentary and geomorphic settings. 

 

Professor Colin Woodroffe

Colin Woodroffe is a coastal geomorphologist, with an international reputation for geomorphological studies of dynamic coastlines. His career has transitioned from intensive fieldwork, to a wider synthesis of coastal morphodynamics. He undertook pioneering studies of mangrove and coral reef development, in relation to sea-level history, in the Cayman Islands, Belize, Tuvalu, Tonga, Kiribati, the Cook Islands, the Maldives, and New Zealand, as well as describing evolution of mangrove-fringed estuaries in northern Australia, and infilled estuaries in New South Wales. His interests have broadened to include coastal and shallow marine habitats at landscape scale combining geospatial and geochronological approaches to examine geomorphological development. From a focus on interpreting past sea levels from stratigraphy of coastal sediments, he has developed insights into shoreline behaviour in response to sea-level changes, and vulnerability of coasts under changing climatic conditions. 

The breadth of Colin’s experience on different types of coasts, enabled him to write the widely used textbook, Coasts: form, process and evolution (2003). He has also co-edited a book on Coastal Evolution (1994) and co-authored The Coast of Australia (2009) and Quaternary Sea-level Changes (2014). He was a lead author on the coastal chapter in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment report, for which the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 (jointly together with Al Gore). After more than three decades teaching and researching at the University of Wollongong, during which he has collaborated widely and nurtured a generation of coastal researchers, he brings a reflective perspective to the interpretation of coastal landscapes as an Emeritus Professor.