Dr Marta Yebra is an Associate Professor in Environmental Engineering at the Fenner School of Environment & Society and the School of Engineering. She is the Director of the ANU/Optus Bushfire Research Centre of Excellence which aims to protect Australia from catastrophic bushfires. She is a Mission Specialist at the ANU Institute for Space and Associate editor for Remote Sensing of Environment. Her research focuses on developing applications of remote sensing for the management of fire risk and impact at local, regional and global scales. 

From 2004-2010 she was employed at the University of Alcala, where she was involved in two large multidisciplinary projects which assessed and integrated the main fire risk factors and analysed fire risk trends, considering potential changes in socio-economic factors as well as foreseen impacts of climate change. During her research, she spent time at the Centre for Spatial Technologies and Remote Sensing (University of California at Davis, USA); the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA, Argentina) and the School of Environmental and Life Sciences of Salford (UK).

From 2010 to 2013 Marta was a postdoctoral fellow at CSIRO Land and Water as developing innovative methods to integrate satellite and in-situ observations from micrometeorological tower sites with models to predict carbon-water coupling. 

In 2017, Dr Yebra was awarded the prestigious Max Day Environmental Science Fellowship from the Australian Academy of Science. She was also awarded the CSIRO Pyne-Scott Career Award in 2013 and the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC's Outstanding Achievement in Research Utilization award in 2019.

She has been invited to present at >30 national and international conferences, including two keynote talks. Dr Yebra has been a member of nine scientific conference committees and convenor of national and international conferences and workshops.

She has taught in 13 undergraduate and graduate courses, including "Environmental Sensing, Mapping and Modelling", "Advanced Remote Sensing and GIS", "Fire in the Environment", and "Environmental measurement, modelling and monitoring". Accreditation as a senior lecturer by the Spanish Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation. She supervises honours and graduates research scholars in diverse wildland fire topics (see below).

High Degree Research

• Mr Gianluca Scortechini, Fenner School of Environment and Society, ANU. Topic:  Global dynamics of Fuel Moisture Content and applications. Role: Panel chair and  primary supervisor
• Mr Sami Ullah Shah, Fenner School of Environment and Society, ANU. Topic: Development of an integrated method to characterise wildfire hazard using remote sensing data and GIS. Role: Panel chair and  primary supervisor
• Ms Li Zhao, Fenner School of Environment and Society, ANU. Topic: Forecasting coupled litter and root zone moisture dynamics. Role: Panel chair and  primary supervisor
• Mr Mat Gale, Fenner School of Environment and Society, ANU. Topic:   Applications of Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) for Bushfire Fuel Hazard Assessment in Australian Forests. Role: supervisory panel member
• Mr Wentao Ye, Fenner School of Environment and Society, ANU. Topic: A remote sensing approach to analyse ecosystem resilience. Role: supervisory panel member
• Mr Yizhi Li, Fenner School of Environment and Society, ANU. Topic: Integration of vegetation remote sensing into a probabilistic drought forecasting framework. Role: supervisory panel member.
• Mr Ivan Kotzur, Western Sydney University. Topic: How does spatial and temporal variability in water and microclimate create koala refugia? Role: supervisory panel member

Special Topic

I have supervised 8 Honours/Masters students, 9 undergraduate students and hosted 9 self-funded visitors and students (3 senior researchers, 3 PhD candidates, one master student and two undergraduate students). I am also an external expert at the OzEWEX Australian Climate and Water Summer Institute since 2016 where I guide several students on their research topics.