Brendan McKie is a professor of freshwater ecology since 1 March 2025. His inauguration lecture has the title "Fragmented Rivers, Fading Life: The Case for Ecological Connectivity".
Brendan McKie's research focuses on how environmental changes affect the network of life forms in streams, rivers, lakes and adjacent land ecosystems. He examines changes in biodiversity, ecosystem function and how well different habitats are interconnected. The aim is to better understand the fundamental ecology of freshwaters, and support the development of effective, science-based environmental management. In parallel, he evaluates if the restoration and mitigation actions we invest in to improve freshwater ecosystems actually work.
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Biography
Brendan McKie was born 1972 in Canberra, Australia, where a local stream sparked a fascination with freshwater ecology. He completed undergraduate studies at the Australian National University in 1996 and earned a PhD in ecology in 2002 at James Cook University, investigating rainforest streams in Australia’s Wet Tropics. Following a postdoc at University of California Davis, he joined Umeå University, Sweden, where he 2002–2008 worked on European projects investigating biodiversity–ecosystem functioning relationships. He then moved to SLU, Uppsala, where he has established basic and applied research addressing ecological connectivity and restoration ecology. Brendan McKie became docent in 2010 and Senior Lecturer in 2022.
