Rate My Professor Patrick Baker

Professor Patrick Baker serves as Professor of Silviculture and Forest Ecology in the School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences within the Faculty of Science at the University of Melbourne. He earned a Masters in Forestry from Yale University and a PhD from the University of Washington. Baker's academic career began with a postdoctoral fellowship at the US Forest Service and The Nature Conservancy of Hawaii from 2001 to 2004. He then held positions as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in the School of Biological Sciences at Monash University from 2004 to 2012, before joining the University of Melbourne as a professor in 2013. Previously recognized as an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, he leads the Landscape and Forest Dynamics research group.

Baker's research centers on forest dynamics, investigating tree growth patterns, forest structural changes, the drivers of these dynamics, and their application to enhance forest management. His studies encompass tropical and temperate forests, climate influences on tree growth, and silvicultural approaches to bolster resilience against climate change while accelerating habitat recovery for endangered species. Key projects include forest restoration and regeneration in Laos, ecological thinning in temperate eucalypt forests of southern Australia, coexistence mechanisms of eucalypts in mixed-species forests, and long-term dynamics of species-rich tropical forests in Southeast Asia. He contributes to the Forest Global Earth Observatory network through the Starvation Creek plot in Australia. Notable publications include 'Detecting and attributing climate change effects on vegetation: Australia as a test case' (2015), 'Fire as a fundamental ecological process: Research advances and frontiers' (2020), 'Dendroecology: Tree-Ring Analyses Applied to Ecological Studies' (2017), 'Pervasive increase in tree mortality across the Australian continent' (2026), and 'Global warming reduces the carrying capacity of the tallest angiosperm species (Eucalyptus regnans)' (2025). Baker received the Bjarne K. Dahl Medal in 2026 from Eucalypt Australia for his pioneering work on Australian eucalypt silviculture and ecology. His scholarship, with over 12,000 citations, shapes global understanding of forest responses to disturbance and climate.