Prof David Hamilton
Griffith University, Australia | Director and a Professor in the Australian Rivers Institute
David Hamilton is Director and a Professor in the Australian Rivers Institute, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. He has led national and international transdisciplinary research programs, chaired major national and international conferences (e.g., the World Lake Conference 2025), established global networks as a founding member of GLEON – the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network, and is Editor in Chief of the scientific journal Inland Waters. Hamilton has supervised 35 PhD students to completion, and many are now in senior roles in academia, government and industry. He has received regional, national and international research awards, including the NZFSS medal and the International Society for Limnology Baldi Award. After an academic position at the University of Western Australia from 1991 to 2002, Hamilton became the inaugural Bay of Plenty Regional Council Chair in Lake Restoration at the University of Waikato from 2002 to 2017. He has 360 peer reviewed scientific publications and is actively involved in applications of water models and with advisory groups to promote the management of aquatic ecosystems.
The need for south-to-south collaborations in global assessments of inland waters.
Knowledge from northern temperate inland water ecosystems of the Northern Hemisphere has been widely extrapolated to global assessments. This extrapolation remains pervasive in teaching, research and publications on inland waters globally. I argue that this authorship and geographic polarisation has resulted in inadequacy of knowledge and experience suitable to guide the management and restoration of inland waters in the southern hemisphere. Specifically, we are missing critical sources of information from Traditional Knowledge, waterbodies in tropical, subtropical and maritime climatic regimes, and food webs, salt lakes, and aquaculture-intensive waterbodies of the Southern Hemisphere. I present several opportunities to address these issues, primarily revolving around improved collaborative networks that support inclusivity, diversity and time-zone alignments. Such collaborations include ensuring Indigenous peoples are fully integrated in research partnerships, advocating that Southern Hemisphere authors are adequately represented in global water assessment studies, and dismantling the preferential treatment of authors from developed countries by publishers. These changes can be operationalised through south-to-south collaborations that can begin to address the persistent and pervasive inequalities and disadvantages experienced by aquatic scientists from the Southern Hemisphere in global water assessments.