Plant responses to changing environment

Ecosystems are under pressure from a variety of global change processes such as warmer temperatures, changing precipitation and fire regimes, and increased occurrence and intensity of heatwaves. Plants have remarkable capacity to tolerate and respond to challenging environmental conditions via physiological tolerance, phenotypic plasticity, and evolutionary adaptation. For example, future climate projections predict that alpine plants may enjoy a longer growing season but may be subject to water limitation as rain and snowfall become more variable. As many plant species of the desert and alpine environment have cultural significance and support ecosystem function, understanding drivers of ecosystem change have value to many stakeholders. Understanding how shifts in climatic conditions push plants toward critical tipping points and beyond their physiological limits, and the implications of this for maintaining ecological function and population persistence is a key goal of our research.

Research opportunities in the lab can be tailored to the individual interests of students in all the current projects described on our group page. At present we are actively seeking applications for the following projects (click the links for more details on specific projects): 

SOSG: Save Our Snowgums: Snow gums of the Australian Alps are undergoing a mass mortality event. Researchers and land managers are seeking to understand biotic and abiotic drivers of this dieback and identify intervention options. 

ATLS: Assessing Thermal Load Sensitivity over the lifetime of Australian plants: Temperature determines species distributions and affects functions, reproduction, and survival. This project will assess the thermal sensitivity of different life stages and plant tissues to heat stress and will develop models to assess how Australian plant species will respond to a warmer and more extreme climate.

FutureClim: Responses of alpine communities to future climate change: This project aims to improve understanding of the capacity for resilience and response to warming and drying conditions and extreme events in vulnerable alpine communities: interacting suites of alpine plants, soil invertebrates, fungi, and microbes.

Enhancing climate-resilience of ecological restoration: If you're interested in working in the iconic landscape of Kosciuszko National Park this project may be for you. We seek PhD or Honours students to join a collaborative project with NSW DPE to explore drivers of variation of growth and establishment of the montane and alpine species in rehabilitated sites. 

AMRF: Australian Mountain Research Facility: The Australian Mountain Environmental Research Facility is a collaboration across universities and land management agencies that will bring together leading institutions and researchers across 4 jurisdictions to produce world-leading ecosystem, evolutionary and biophysical science to guide adaptive management of High Mountains across Australia. Follow the link above to learn more about research opportunities associated with AMRF.

Climate Change Impacts on Plants in Ulura-Kata Tjuta National Park: This project examines drivers of dieback impact between species, within species, between habitats, within habitats, across the landscape, as well as interactions between these components at Uluru Kata Tjuta National Park. Potential honours projects in this area would focus on seed and seedling biology of desert plants using glasshouse experiments and work at the Australian National Botanic Gardens.