Welcome

Ricky Archer is a Djungan man from the Western Tablelands region of North Queensland and was appointed to the role of Director of National Parks in November 2023. His prior experience includes serving as the CEO of the North Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance, including as a Ranger and an IPA Manager. Ricky holds qualifications in conservation and land management, social science, and management.

Ricky’s involvement extends to collaborating with government entities, having served on several Commonwealth committees, including the Indigenous Advisory Committee, the National Landcare Advisory Committee, and contributing to the Samuel review – the independent Review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. Ricky is a strong supporter and advocate of the Indigenous Ranger movement and the Indigenous Protected Areas program.

Professor Daniel Wildcat is a Yuchi member of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma. Dr. Wildcat received an interdisciplinary PhD from the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and his service as teacher and administrator at Haskell Indian Nations University spans thirty-seven years. He was the Gordon Russell visiting professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth College in 2013. In 1994, he partnered with the Hazardous Substance Research Center at Kansas State University to create the Haskell Environmental Research Studies (HERS) Center. He is a noted speaker on Traditional Ecological Knowledges and has offered programs for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, the American Geophysical Union, the Ecological Society of America, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, and many scientific organizations and universities.

Taryn is the founder of Coral Maker, a reef restoration company focussed on using technology for scaled coral deployment.

Taryn is trained as a coral biologist specialising in climate change impacts on coral reefs. She has 10+ years of research experience in coral growth, reproduction, monitoring reef health, and bleaching events. She worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, before being awarded a Fulbright Fellowship with the California Academy of Sciences to research some of the concepts behind Coral Maker.

Since founding Coral Maker, she has built corporate partnerships with global companies, including US-based technology company Autodesk, and EU-based robotics hardware company, Universal Robots. These collaborations with robotics, AI, and design engineers have resulted in world-first innovations, including using computer vision and AI to robotically pick and place corals and mass-producing stone bases for coral deployment.

Coral Maker was recently granted a 10-hectare site at the Abrolhos Islands in Western Australia, for a large ocean-based coral nursery, with deployment beginning in 2025.