Hello! I am a Senior Research Fellow in the School of BioSciences at the University of Melbourne.
My research and teaching draw upon the practices of structured decision-making, adaptive management, and risk assessment. I work closely with government agencies to develop qualitative and quantitative models, facilitate expert elicitation workshops, and apply structured decision making to various environmental management decision contexts.
As a plant ecologist I have always been fascinated by the process of change in ecological communities, and the factors driving those changes. I’m also deeply interested in the process of decision-making in natural resource management and conservation.
Quite varied interests you might say! I like to think my work brings those interests together, and here is my attempt to explain how …
Ecological systems are highly complex and variable through time and space, and our understanding of how and why these systems change is inherently uncertain. Yet despite this uncertainty managers routinely have to make decisions about how best to invest precious resources to manage these systems. Such decisions typically sit against a backdrop of multiple (and competing) environmental, economic and social objectives. With all this in mind, it’s easy to see why such problems are commonly described as ‘wicked’. Through my work, I develop tools and techniques to help resolve the uncertainty that hampers decision-making.
For more detail on my research projects, please see the relevant pages on this website, or feel free to contact me:
Dr Libby Rumpff
Senior Research Fellow
School of BioSciences
University of Melbourne VIC 3010
Phone: 03 8344 8091
Email: lrumpff ‘at’ unimelb.edu.au
Libby Rumpff | research & consulting 
Hi Libby, I will, unfortunately, miss your upcoming talk on structured decision making. I would love to have a look at it at a later stage. I just started a PhD on a seemingly unrelated topic but spent a few years trying to manage natural resources and this topic of SDM is close to my heart.