Chris Sanderson

Chris is based in Brisbane and is a reformed vertebrate ecologist who now spends most of his limited time in the field looking at butterflies. Currently working with the Queensland Government, his role is to provide habitat mapping and advice on fauna to legislators and decisionmakers within government. During his formative years, Chris was lucky to have a grandmother who was a passionate birdwatcher, a passion which appears to have rubbed off on him. This early love of birds turned into a love of butterflies, reptiles, mammals, frogs, orchids, dragonflies, and everything else that makes up the diversity of our natural world. Chris completed a dual degree in Science and Information Technology at the University of Queensland, before embarking on a career working in a diverse range of ecology related professions. He spent several years working for Birdlife Australia, particularly focusing on their citizen science activities (before people were calling it citizen science), which mostly consisted of convincing interested people to write down what birds they were seeing and send it to him. After this, he spent a long time working as an ecological consultant, where he spent most of his time writing down what animals he saw and sending that to other people. In 2012, Chris found a small orange butterfly near Darwin, which became a bigger deal than he expected, and eventually led to meeting Michael Braby and starting the Butterflies Australia project. Butterflies Australia is a citizen science project which established a nation-wide database for interested people to, you guessed it, write down what butterflies they see and send it to us! Chris is looking forwards to MABA continuing what was started with Butterflies Australia and growing the contribution of citizen science to the field of Lepidoptery.