Professor Adrienne Nicotra moved to Australia following a PhD researching plant reproductive ecology in the dark wet understory of the Costa Rican rain forest. She has been researching plant life in a sunny climate ever since.

Research interests: Her interests include the adaptive significance of phenotypic plasticity, the evolution of leaf shape, comparative ecology, plant reproductive ecology and plant life in alpine environments.

Doctor Zach Brown moved to Australia to do a PhD studying the impacts of climate change on plant-soil interactions and nutrient cycling in a Tasmanian grassland. Recently graduated, he’s now managing the AMRF project.

Research interests: His interests include terrestrial carbon and nitrogen cycling, water cycling and landscape-level processes. He prefers to use instrumentation and field manipulations to study these processes.

Professor Geoff Cary completed his PhD in Ecology and the Australian National University. He has given a keynote address on fuel management at the Wildland Fire Canada Conference and has been an invited speaker at numerous others.

Research interests: Geoff’s focus is landscape-scale fire management & climate change effects on fire regimes using experimentation and simulations.

Professor Mark Hovenden completed his PhD at University of Tasmania investigating terrestrial ecology of lichens of the Windmill Islands, near Casey Station. He studied the effects of low temperature on eucalypts at the Terrestrial Hardwood Forestry CRC before returning to the School of Plant Science as an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow working on the impacts of climate on leaf form and growth of the southern beech, Nothofagus cunninghamii. He is currently a professor in the Discipline of Biological Sciences at University of Tasmania.

Research interests: Mark is a plant ecologist with a particular interest in linking plant function with the function of the ecosystem. He seeks a greater understanding of the way that plants interact with each other and the environment to control ecosystem functioning. He uses manipulative field experiments to studying the responses of individual plants right up to studying how the whole ecosystem responds.

Associate Professor Ben Kefford is currently at the Institute for Applied Ecology at the University of Canberra. He completed an honours degree at Monash University and a PhD at RMIT University. He went on to do a postdoc with RMIT University at Casey Station in Antarctica followed by an additional postdoc at University of Technology Sydney and the UFZ for Environmental Research (in Leipzig, Germany).

Research interests: Ben studies the effects of environmental stressors on stream invertebrates and ecosystem processes such as decomposition as well as the ecological effects of contaminants and other stressors in freshwater systems.

Professor Angela Moles leads the Big Ecology Lab, in the Evolution & Ecology Research Centre in the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of New South Wales.

Research interests: Angela’s current research is to quantify the ecological strategies employed by plant species in different environments and to better understand the selective processes underlying global patterns in ecological strategy.

Michael Pettit is the Director for Southern Ranges Branch within the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service. His first posting with the then NSW Forestry Commission was at Tumbarumba, where he was instilled with a great love of the mountains. He has worked, lived and raised a family in and around the mountains since 1980.

‘Mick’ is excited to being part of the AMRF process to bring science and management together to achieve long lasting and positive results and true adaptive management.

Dr Susanna Venn is a Senior Lecturer and ARC Discovery Early Career Research Fellow at the Centre for Integrative Ecology, Deakin University. Susanna is a botanist and plant ecologist with a keen interest in the processes that shape vegetation patterns in alpine areas.

Research interests: Susanna is focused on how snow influences plant community patterns, processes and community (re)assembly. Snow is one of the most influential environmental factors in alpine areas. Snowpack depth, snow accumulation patterns, snow duration and the timing of snowmelt all interact to affect many levels of plant community organisation and functioning.

Professor Justin Borevitz earned a PhD in 2002 from the University of California at San Diego dissecting the genetic basis of adaptive traits and environmental response in model plants. He completed a postdoc at the Salk Institute mapping plant functional genomic diversity. Justin then was an assistant and associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. He currently is a professor at the Australian National University.

Research interests: Justin’s focus is on next generation sequencing in emerging crop and foundation species, genetics of climate adaptation in plants and using plant phenomics to improve landscape restoration.

Dr Tim Brown completed a PhD in 2006 from the University of Utah in the US, combining theory, field work and modeling of self-organized swarming behavior in New World army ants. From 2006 to 2012 he founded and ran an environmental consulting business in the US (TimeScience) developing phenocams and billion-pixel resolution timelapse cameras. He completed a postdoc at ANU in plant phenomics. Tim is currently the Director of the ANU node of the Australian Plant Phenomics Facility.

Research interests: Tim focuses on developing open source hardware and software pipelines for enabling high throughput phenotyping, high resolution monitoring and visualization of environmental and research data. He is a co-founder of the Australian Phenocam Network and creator of EcoVR, a software package for modelling research sites and visualizing time-series environmental data in virtual reality using computer game engine technology.

Associate Professor Will Cornwell completed a Masters at Cambridge on patterns of richness at local and regional scales in the Central European Flora. He then finished his PhD at Stanford working in California, Hawaii, and Australia on plant trait effects on both community assembly and the carbon cycle. Will continued this work as a post-doc in Holland and at the Biodiveristy Resarch Centre at UBC and later did a postdoc at UC Berkeley.

Research interests: Will’s interests lie at the intersection of plant eco-physiology, community ecology and ecosystem ecology. He is especially interested in using basic ecological tools, especially functional traits, to understand the effects of climate change on terrestrial biodiversity.

Professor Don Driscoll is the director of the Centre for Integrative Ecology at Deakin University in Australia. He’s held positions at Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University and at Flinders University.

Research interests: Don’s research has conservation biology as a central theme, with a focus on how species use whole landscapes, particularly the role of dispersal. He takes a range of approaches, including manipulative experiments, natural experiments and the application of population genetic techniques.

Dr Lisa Evans is the Senior Aquatic Ecologist for the Conservation Research Unit within the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate for the ACT Government.

Interests and aims: I manage and provide advice on the ACT threatened and non-threatened aquatic resources, prepare or fund and implement conservation strategies, action plans, on ground research and management activities.

Professor David Keith is based at University of New South Wales in Sydney in the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences.

Research interests: David studies vegetation dynamics of alpine bogs in relation to fire, grazing & climate change as well as trait responses of alpine plants to climate change

Frazer Muir completed a Masters of Science Marine, GeoScience at the University of Canberra, he then went on to work at James Cook University investigating the geological evolution of the Great Barrier Reef. He further went on to become the principle scientist then Regional Manager for the Queensland branch of NPWS. Frazer continues this work as the Manager for the southern ranges branch of New South Wales, National Parks & Wildlife Service within the Department for Planning, Industry and Environment.

Interests & aims: Management and planning of fire and pest control programs, the regional fire and other incident response team, to provide strategic support and advice on priority regional programs and projects.

Professor Eelco J. Rohling is based at the Research School of Earth Sciences at The Australian National University in Canberra with affiliation with the University of Southampton, National Oceanography Centre Southampton, UK. He completed his PhD from the University of Utrecht. He then completed a postdoc fellowship at Utrecht and another at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Mass. USA. Eelco is well-published in peer-reviewed journals and has published several public science books.

Research interests: Eelco’s research focuses on ocean and climate change with emphasis on sea level, climate sensitivity, and past episodes of enhanced carbon burial. And is an editor at several major journals including Reviews of Geophysics.

Dr Marta Yebra is a senior scientist at the Centre for Water and Landscape Dynamics (Fenner School of Environment and Society) at ANU. 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. 

Research interests: Marta focuses on using remote sensing data to monitor, quantify and forecast natural resources, natural hazards, and landscape function and health at local, regional and global scales. Her previous work 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 global climate change.