About Us

Ecological Surveys and Planning was established in 1996 by Dr Steve Douglas when he completed a contract for the NSW National Parks & Wildlife Service working on the pioneering Urban Bushland Biodiversity Survey of Western Sydney. His first consultancy contract was for the GreenWeb Sydney project that mapped bushland, habitat corridors and threatened biota to assist with Council and Catchment Management Authority-based environmental planning and management.

Steve holds a Bachelor of Science from Macquarie University (1993), a Masters of Environmental Planning from Macquarie’s Graduate School of the Environment (1996), a PhD (Human Ecology / Environmental Sociology) from the Australian National University (2008), and a Graduate Certificate in Information Literacy from the ANU (2007).

He has held a post-doctoral publication scholarship from the ANU (completed at Melbourne University); was an Adjunct Research Fellow at Monash University, and a Visiting Fellow at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment at Western Sydney University. He is currently an Adjunct Fellow in the School of Social Sciences at Western Sydney University.

He is assisted by a range of sub-consultants and works in a mix of project teams, with smaller jobs usually including consultants who deal with on-site sewerage / stormwater, and bushfire risk assessments. Where necessary, specialist fauna consultants are engaged. Steve has also been engaged by large consultancy firms to assess ecological impacts associated with a range of engineering projects including water and sewerage infrastructure renewal or construction; a gold mine; a national optical fibre cable rollout; and the Snowy Hydro 2.0 pumped hydro power scheme. This has included working for consultancy businesses previously operated by Charles Sturt University and the former Ballarat University.