By Jessica Micallef
Sunbury’s Cass Cleever is hoping to bring life back to landscapes impacted by a major bushfire.
The 25-year-old has received a $120,000 Westpac Future Leaders Scholarship to help her play a part in assisting with the recovery after a major bushfire event.
“I feel incredibly lucky and humbled,” she said.
“The scholarship … is to make some sort of impact in Australia so I know how lucky I am be to selected.”
Having grown up in Yarra Valley and lived through the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009, Ms Cleever knows first hand the devastation a major fire event can cause.
“The Black Saturday bushfires are still ever present in my mind,” she said.
“It’s what has lead me down this path, which is to help advance biodiversity growth after an extreme bushfire event.
“Areas that have the highest devastation, and we are talking large scale impact, haven’t quite recovered and it’s not sufficient to be able to bring back a lot of the animals and have it back to a normal functioning state.”
Ms Cleever said when dealing with a large scale impact after a fire event, recovery to help revitalise the landscape couldn’t be done by people alone.
She will use the scholarship to research information technology at Monash University to equip her with the skills to help tackle the issue head on.
“It is a hope that we can use information technology to be able to help do the processes for us,” she said.
“My end goal is to have a fleet of drones that are able to action certain things to help the environment rebound.
“After a fire event, there are certain things in the landscape that need adjusting [and] … the drone will have the smarts to know what to do.
“It cleverly figures out the steps that need to be taken in order to quickly regenerate the environment.”
