Emeritus Professor Henry Allan Nix AO
Tertiary education and early career
Henry was educated Queensland Agricultural College (QDA 1956) and University of Queensland (BAgrSc 1960).
Time at CSIRO
Henry was Senior Principal Research Scientist in the CSIRO Division of Water and Land Resources. He is a pioneer of computer-based methods of land resource inventory and evaluation for a wide range of potential uses that include field and horticultural crops, forestry, hydrology and biodiversity conservation. He led the development of the BIOCLIM package. Building primary climatic databases began in the mid-1960s and in 1978 he recruited Michael Hutchinson to develop improved climatic interpolation methods. The 1986 BIOCLIM study of elapid (i.e. venomous) snakes, which provides the example used here has been cited in Google Scholar nearly one thousand times.
Career highlights at other organisations
Henry is a Visiting Fellow at, and former Director from 1986-1999 of, the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies (CRES), now the Fenner School of Environment and Society, at the Australian National University.
In recent years Professor Nix has advised on the setting up of the Biodiversity Climate Change Virtual Laboratory (BCCVL). This supports the use of BIOCLIM as well as several other species distribution modelling methods that have developed since the launch of BIOCLIM in 1984.
Honours and awards
Awards
| 1988 | UQ Gatton Gold Medal |
| 2000 | Officer of the Order of Australia for service to the environment |