Max Finlayson is an internationally renown wetland ecologist with extensive experience  internationally in water pollution, mining and agricultural impacts, invasive species, climate change, and human wellbeing and wetlands. He has participated in global assessments such as those conducted by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and the Global Environment Outlook. Since the early 1990s he has been a technical advisor to the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. He has also been actively involved in environmental NGOs and from 2002-07 was the President of the governing council of global NGO Wetlands International.

Max has worked extensively on the inventory, assessment and monitoring of wetlands, in particular in wet tropical, wet-dry tropical and sub-tropical climatic regimes covering pollution, invasive species and climate change. His current research interests/projects including the following:
• Wetland restoration and construction, including waste water treatment
• Wetland management policies, planning and monitoring
• Wetlands, water availability, agriculture and climate change
• Water quality and change in ecological condition of lakes, rivers and wetlands
• Integration of ecologic, economic and social requirements and trade-offs between users
• Landscape change involving wetlands/rivers and land use (agriculture and mining)

Max has contributed to over 200 journal articles, reports, guidelines, proceedings and book chapters on wetland ecology and management. He has contributed to the development of concepts and methods for wetland inventory, assessment and monitoring, and undertaken many site-based assessments in many countries.