Interests
Remote sensing of vegetation biophysical properties, such as fuel load and moisture content for spatial fire risk analysis, and canopy conductance for carbon sequestration and water balance studies.
Research
Please see the Environmental Engineering or this link for further information on Associate Professor Yebra’s work.
Biography
Dr Marta Yebra is an Associate Professor in Environmental Engineering at the Fenner School of Environment & Society and the school of Engineering. She is the Director of the ANU-Optus Bushfire Research Centre of Excellence which aims to use technology to protect Australia from catastrophic bushfires. She is a Mission Specialist at the ANU Institute for Space and Associate editor for Remote Sensing of Environment. Her research focuses on developing applications of remote sensing for the management of fire risk and impact at local, regional and global scales. She has served on several advisory government bodies including the Australian Space Agency’s Bushfire Earth Observation Taskforce (Feb-May 2020), Australian Space Agency’s Earth Observation Technical Advisory Group (Since 2019) and the Victorian Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning’s Scientific Reference Panel (Since 2019) and ACT Multi Hazards Advisory Council (Since 2021).
From 2004-2010 she was employed at the University of Alcala, where she was involved in two large multidisciplinary projects which assessed and integrated the main fire risk factors and analysed fire risk trends, considering potential changes in socio-economic factors as well as foreseen impacts of global climate change. During her research, she spent time at the Centre for Spatial Technologies and Remote Sensing (University of California at Davis, USA); the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA, Argentina) and the School of Environmental and Life Sciences of Salford (UK).
From 2010 to 2013 Marta was a postdoctoral fellow at CSIRO Land and Water developing innovative methods to integrate satellite and in-situ observations from micrometeorological tower sites with models to predict carbon-water coupling.
Activities & Awards
In 2017, Dr Yebra was awarded the prestigious Max Day Environmental Science Fellowship from the Australian Academy of Science. She was also awarded the CSIRO Pyne-Scott Career Award in 2013 and the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC’s Outstanding Achievement in Research Utilization award in 2019.
She has been invited to present at >30 national and international conferences, including eight keynote talks. Dr Yebra has been a member of nine scientific conference committees and convenor of national and international conferences and workshops.
She has taught in 13 undergraduate and graduate courses, including “Environmental Sensing, Mapping and Modelling”, “Advanced Remote Sensing and GIS”, “Fire in the Environment”, and “Environmental measurement, modelling and monitoring”. Accreditation as a senior lecturer by the Spanish Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation. She supervises honours and graduates research scholars in diverse wildland fire topics (see this link).