School of Physical, Environmental and Mathematical Sciences

Alistair Drake

Dr Alistair Drake

Visiting Fellow
BA (Hons), DPhil, Oxford, GradCertHEd, UNSW

 

Telephone: +61 2 6268 8020
Fax: +61 2 6268 8786
Email:  a.drake@adfa.edu.au
Location:  PEMS Sth, Room 118

My UNSW Research Gateway Profile

Research Interests:
"Radar entomology", especially the development of a radar for monitoring insect migration. Insect migration, especially its biometeorology and its role in the spatial dynamics of insect populations.  Forecasting of migrant insect pests.  Studies of locust and moth migrations and their ecological and economic significance, especially in Australia and China.

Lower Atmosphere Research Group - Insect migration

Biography

I am a Senior Lecturer with The University of New South Wales (UNSW), located in UNSW@ADFA's School of PEMS in Canberra. My employment duties are principally to teach undergraduate students of the University College (most of whom are officer cadets of the Australian Defence Force) and to undertake research.

Before coming to ADFA I was a researcher with CSIRO's Division of Entomology for over a decade, working on insect migration. My PhD training was in elementary particle physics, and I have also spent a period in industry, working on defence-related projects.

Teaching

My teaching is in the areas of meteorology, electromagnetics, and remote sensing. I am currently responsible for the following courses:-

I have an interest in on-line teaching, and two of the above courses make extensive use of on-line materials.

I also demonstrate laboratory classes, supervise 3rd-year projects, and coordinate the 1st-year Physics component of the BSc, BE and BTech degrees. I teach the "biological effects" component of the School's training course for Radio-frequency Radiation Safety Officers.

Research
Insect Migration - population ecology and biometeorology

Migration is an adaptation to changes in the availability of the resources the migrant needs to grow and reproduce; in particular it allows an animal to exploit resources that arise in different places at different times. In subtropical semi-arid regions, where resource availability is driven by rainfall that is typically erratic, these changes are largely unpredictable, and the migratory adaptation differs from that of animals at middle and high latitudes where migration is largely a response to regular seasonal changes of temperature. Meteorology plays an additional important role in insect migration because, as insect airspeeds are low, long-distance movement is largely windborne; an insect’s mobile life stage may last only a few days, and if wind “transport” in an appropriate direction does not occur during this period the insect will not survive. The long-term datasets produced by the two IMRs are being explored from these perspectives. The radars show moth migration to be predominant in early spring and locust migration in summer, with both taxa present in late spring and in autumn. Radar data have demonstrated the importance of northward and westward “return” movements of locusts into inland Queensland in spring and early summer, to coincide with summer rainfall that often produces very favourable conditions for locust breeding there – the most common process for initiating a plague. The role in locust migration of the inland trough, an semi-persistent feature of the summer weather chart for subtropical eastern Australia that modulates both wind direction and the probability of rainfall, is currently being investigated.

The application of IMR micro-network to locust detection and forecasting

My current principal research project is an investigation of locust migration in eastern Australia, using two Insect Monitoring Radars (IMRs) installed in the “outback” – one at Bourke in northwest New South Wales and the other at Thargomindah in southwest Queensland. This project is a collaboration with the Australian Plague Locust Commission (APLC), which has the task of forecasting locust outbreaks in the inland and controlling them before they reach agricultural regions. The research has received ARC grant funding, most recently in 2003-2006 through the Linkage scheme with APLC as the industry partner. The focus of my part of this research has been the extraction of entomologically useful information from the very large amounts of data recorded by the radars. This includes both estimates of the intensity, direction, and spatial extent of the migrations, and identifications of the migrants. Progress has been made recently in “characterising” the radar echoes according to their size, their polarization parameters, and the frequency and amplitude of any wing-beating modulation. This seems to allow locusts to be distinguished from other migrant species (usually large moths). Future work is likely to focus on improving the confidence with which the targets can be identified, both through verification in the field and by laboratory measurement of large samples of likely migrant species.

IMR at Bourke

IMR #1 at Bourke, New South Wales, April 1998. Photo: Alistair Drake.

For more on "radar entomology", see The Radar Entomology Web Site (which I maintain).

PhD Opportunities and Scholarships

If you are interested in a PhD or Masters by Research -

Contact: Dr Alistair Drake, a.drake@adfa.edu.au
Possible topic: Insect target identification, new approaches to entomological radar design.

Research Collaborators

In addition to my current collaboration with the Australian Plague Locust Commission, I have links with all "radar entomologists" world-wide and have collaborated with most over the years. I have also had productive collaborations with a number of entomologists interested in insect migration, especially in Australia, China, and the USA, and have participated in a number of field research programs in the latter two countries.

I am currently co-authoring a monograph on radar entomology with a UK scientist.

Selected Publications
Research
  1. Dingle, H. & Drake, V.A., 2007, What is migration?, Bioscience, 57(2), 113-121.
  2. Dean, T.J. & Drake,V.A., 2005, Monitoring insect migration with radar: The ventral-aspect polarization pattern and its potential for target identification, International Journal of Remote Sensing, 26(18), 3957-3974, DOI: 10.1080/01431160500165955.
  3. Drake, V.A., 2005, Radar interrogation of high-flying insects: What bug is that? 4 pp in National Congress 2005 Australian Institute of Physics Congress Proceedings CD-ROM, Australian Institute of Physics, Sydney.
  4. Harman, I.T. & Drake,V.A., 2004, Insect monitoring radar: Analytical time-domain algorithm for retrieving trajectory and target parameters,Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, 43, 23-41.
  5. Wang, H.K. & Drake,V.A., 2004, Insect monitoring radar: Retrieval of wingbeat information from conical-scan observation data,Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, 43, 209-222.
  6. Drake,V.A., 2002, Automatically operating radars for monitoring insect pest migrations, Entomologia Sinica, 9, 27-39.
  7. Drake,V.A., Harman, I.T. & Wang, H.K., 2002, Insect monitoring radar: Stationary-beam operating mode,Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, 35, 111-137.
  8. Drake,V.A., Wang, H.K., & Harman, I.T., 2002, Insect monitoring radar: Remote and network operation, Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, 35, 77-94.
  9. Drake,V.A., Gregg, P.C., Harman, I.T., Wang, H.K., Deveson, E.D., Hunter, D.M., & Rochester, W.A., 2001, Characterizing insect migration systems in inland Australia with novel and traditional methodologies, Insect Movement: Mechanisms and Consequences (I. Woiwod & D.R. Reynolds, eds) pp. 207-233, CABI Publishing, Wallingford, U.K.
  10. Drake, V.A.,1998, Forecasting highly mobile pests - confronting the limits of predictability?, Pest Management - Future Challenges. Proceedings of the Sixth Australasian Applied Entomological Research Conference, Brisbane, Australia, 29 September-2 October 1998, Vol 2. (M.P. Zalucki, R.A.I. Drew, G.G. White, eds), pp. 63-72.
  11. Drake, V.A. & Gatehouse, A.G., 1996, Population trajectories through space and time: A holistic approach to insect migration, Frontiers of Population Ecology (R.B. Floyd, A.W. Sheppard & P.J. De Barro, eds), pp. 399-408, CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne.
  12. Drake, V.A. & Gatehouse, A.G., (eds) (1995; reprinted 2005) Insect Migration: Tracking Resources through Space and Time.Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. 478 pp.
    [ Reviews of this book have appeared in twelve scientific journals/bulletins.]
  13. Drake, V.A., Gatehouse, A.G., & Farrow, R.A., 1995, Insect migration: A holistic conceptual model, Insect Migration: Tracking Resources through Space and Time (V.A. Drake & A.G. Gatehouse, eds), pp. 427-457, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
  14. Drake,V.A., 1994, The influence of weather and climate on agriculturally important insects: An Australian perspective, Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 45, 487-509.
  15. Drake,V.A. & Farrow, R.A., 1988, The influence of atmospheric structure and motions on insect migration, Annual Review of Entomology, 33, 183-210.
Teaching
  1. Low, D.J., Drake, V.A., & Lynam, P., 2000, Flexible teaching initiatives in Physics at ADFA, Moving Online: A Conference to Explore the Challenges for Workplaces, Colleges and Universities, 18-19 August 2000, Gold Coast, Australia, (M. Wallace, A. Ellis, & D. Newton, eds), pp. 119-129, Southern Cross University Press, Lismore, Australia.
Memberships