Dr John Koehn
2021 ASFB Hall of Fame Award
Dr John Koehn is a freshwater fish ecologist with over forty years of experience working for the Victorian Government. Since a young age, John has always had a passion for fish and is now a nationally recognised freshwater fish expert. He has applied his knowledge of fish ecology and fish life histories to address a suite of management problems, including environmental flow design, climate change impact assessment, river restoration, population recovery actions, and pest species control. John’s early research focussed on Victoria, but later he has addressed broader issues across the Murray-Darling Basin, and internationally.
John has been intrinsically involved in the changing face of freshwater research in both Australia and overseas. John began his career at the Snobs Creek Hatchery in 1980, and in 1982 moved to the Arthur Rylah Institute (ARI) for Environmental Research as a technical officer. John became lead of the Freshwater Ecology Section and is now a Principal Research Scientist at ARI and an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne and Adjunct Professor at Charles Sturt University. John has provided strong leadership through his ongoing mentoring of junior scientists, leading large multi-disciplinary and cross-jurisdictional project teams that have provided realistic management solutions to a diversity of freshwater issues and playing an active role in management and developing strategic research direction at ARI.
Much of John’s research has been innovative, leading to many ‘Australian firsts’ that include: the collection of larval fish in the Murray-Darling Basin, radio tracking freshwater fish in Australia and using automated data loggers, use of high-resolution aerial photography to measure instream woody habitat, boat electrofishing, and development of population models for freshwater fish management. All this pioneering research has resulted in over 300 scientific publications with collectively more than 5500 citations. John received the 1997 Banksia Gold Award and Banksia Catchment Management and Inland Waterways Award, two RiverCare 2000 awards for scientific research, The David Ashton Award for Biodiversity Research and was awarded the Public Service medal for his contribution to Aquatic Conservation in the 2022 Australia Day Honours Awards. Recognition of his expertise has been reflected in inclusion on Ministerial committees and many national recovery teams and advisory/expert panels. John was a key author of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission’s Native Fish Strategy and has led or participated in a range of projects for Commonwealth, State and New Zealand research and management agencies.
John has been an active member of ASFB since 1983 and has served our Society with distinction, including being President 2001-2003. John was also a Victorian Executive Council Member for over 10 years, the founder and chair of the Habitat Committee and acting chair of the threatened fishes committee, a long-standing member of both and the Alien Fishes committee, and member of the Friends Of The Society committee. John has chaired an ASFB conference organising committee, facilitated public forums on climate change impacts in aquatic environments which in turn led to a guest editorial role for a Marine and Freshwater Research special issue on climate change.
Dr John Koehn was inducted into ASFBs Hall of Fame in 2021, in recognition of his outstanding contribution to freshwater fish ecology, particularly in the Murray-Darling, and his service to ASFB.