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School of Physical, Environmental and Mathematical Sciences |
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Research Interests:
" Radar entomology", especially the development of a radar for monitoring insect migration. Insect migration, especially its biometeorology and its role in the spatial dynamics of insect populations. Forecasting of migrant insect pests. Studies of locust and moth migrations and their ecological and economic significance, especially in Australia and China.
Biography
I am a Senior Lecturer with The University of New South Wales (UNSW), located in UNSW@ADFA's School of PEMS in Canberra. My employment duties are principally to teach undergraduate students of the University College (most of whom are officer cadets of the Australian Defence Force) and to undertake research.
Before coming to ADFA I was a researcher with CSIRO's Division of Entomology for over a decade, working on insect migration. My PhD training was in elementary particle physics, and I have also spent a period in industry, working on defence-related projects.
Teaching
My teaching is in the areas of meteorology, electromagnetics, and remote sensing. I am currently responsible for the following courses:-
- Electrostatics and Currents, a component of the 1st-year Physics course taken by all Bachelor of Engineering students.
- Introductory Meteorology, a 1st-year-level general education course.
- Aviation Meteorology AV, a 2nd-year course for the BTech (Aviation) degree.
- Meteorological Remote Sensing, a coursework component of Physics Honours.
I have an interest in on-line teaching, and two of the above courses make extensive use of the on-line educational delivery system WebCT.
I also demonstrate laboratory classes, supervise 3rd-year projects, coordinate the 2nd-year component of the Physics major, and am a member of the School's Undergraduate Education Committee. I teach the "biological effects" component of the School's training course for Radio-frequency Radiation Safety Officers.
Research
My current principal research project is an investigation of locust migration in eastern Australia, using two Insect Monitoring Radars. This project is a collaboration with the Australian Plague Locust Commission, and is funded by an ARC Linkage grant. The focus of my part of this research is the extraction of entomologically useful information from the very large amounts of data recorded by the radars. This includes both estimates of the intensity, direction, and spatial extent of the migrations, and identifications of the migrants. Progress has been made recently in "characterising" the radar echoes according to their size, their polarization parameters, and the frequency and amplitude of any wing-beating modulation. This seems to allow locusts to be distinguished from other migrant species (usually large moths). The radars show moth migration to be predominant in early spring and locust migration in summer, with both taxa present in late spring and in autumn.
For more on "radar entomology", see The Radar Entomology Web Site (which I maintain).
Research Collaborators
In addition to my current collaboration with the Australian Plague Locust Commission, I have links with all "radar entomologists" world-wide and have collaborated with most over the years. I have also had productive collaborations with a number of entomologists interested in insect migration, especially in Australia, China, and the USA, and have participated in a number of field research programs in the latter two countries.
Selected Publications
Research
Dean, T.J. & Drake,V.A. (in press) Monitoring insect migration with radar: the ventral-aspect polarization pattern and its potential for target identification. International Journal of Remote Sensing xx: xx-xx.
Drake, V.A. (2005) Radar interrogation of high-flying insects: what bug is that? 4 pp in National Congress 2005 Australian Institute of Physics Congress Proceedings CD-ROM. Australian Institute of Physics: Sydney.
Harman, I.T. & Drake,V.A. 2004 Insect monitoring radar: analytical time-domain algorithm for retrieving trajectory and target parameters. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 43: 23-41.
Wang, H.K. & Drake,V.A. 2004 Insect monitoring radar: retrieval of wingbeat information from conical-scan observation data. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 43: 209-222.
Drake,V.A. 2002 Automatically operating radars for monitoring insect pest migrations. Entomologia Sinica 9: 27-39.
Drake,V.A., Harman, I.T. & Wang, H.K. 2002 Insect monitoring radar: stationary-beam operating mode. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 35: 111-137.
Drake,V.A., Wang, H.K., & Harman, I.T. 2002 Insect monitoring radar: remote and network operation. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 35: 77-94.
Drake,V.A., Gregg, P.C., Harman, I.T., Wang, H.K., Deveson, E.D., Hunter, D.M., & Rochester, W.A. 2001 Characterizing insect migration systems in inland Australia with novel and traditional methodologies. Pp. 207 233 in Insect Movement: Mechanisms and Consequences (I. Woiwod & D.R. Reynolds, eds). CABI Publishing: Wallingford, U.K.
Drake, V.A. (1998) Forecasting highly mobile pests - confronting the limits of predictability? Pp. 63-72 in Pest Management - Future Challenges. Proceedings of the Sixth Australasian Applied Entomological Research Conference, Brisbane, Australia, 29 September-2 October 1998. Vol 2. (M.P. Zalucki, R.A.I. Drew, G.G. White, eds).
Drake, V.A. & Gatehouse, A.G. (1996) Population trajectories through space and time: a holistic approach to insect migration. Pp. 399-408 in Frontiers of Population Ecology (R.B. Floyd, A.W. Sheppard & P.J. De Barro, eds). CSIRO Publishing: Melbourne.
Drake, V.A. & Gatehouse, A.G. (eds) (1995; reprinted 2005) Insect Migration: Tracking Resources through Space and Time.Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. 478 pp.
[ Reviews of this book have appeared in twelve scientific journals/bulletins.]
Drake,V.A. 1994 The influence of weather and climate on agriculturally important insects: an Australian perspective. Australian Journal of Agricultural Research
Drake,V.A. & Farrow, R.A. 1988 The influence of atmospheric structure and motions on insect migration. Annual Review of Entomology 33: 183-210.
Teaching
Low, D.J., Drake, V.A. , & Lynam, P. (2000) Flexible teaching initiatives in Physics at ADFA. Pp. 119-129 in Moving Online: A Conference to Explore the Challenges for Workplaces, Colleges and Universities. 18-19 August 2000, Gold Coast, Australia. (M. Wallace, A. Ellis, & D. Newton, eds.) Southern Cross University Press: Lismore, Australia.
Memberships
- Australian Institute of Physics
- Royal Meteorological Society
- American Meteorological Society
- Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
- Australian Entomological Society.