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RESEARCH INTERESTS

Ecophysiology of plants

Water use and cycling of carbon and nutrients through ecosystems

Soil processes

Ecosystem function over short and long timescales.

*** New Project: Tumbarumba Eucalyptus forest - modelling analysis over wet and dry years. The aim of this project is to elucidate which mechanisms linking productivity and site water status are important in a wet versus a dry year. This project is a collaborative effort between UNSW and the Department of Climate Change (formerly, the Australian Greenhouse Office) under the Greenhouse Action in Regional Australia (GARA) Strategic R&D Investment Plan, and CSIRO.

Some early results were presented in a poster at the Ecofizz 2007 conference. This work was prepared as a manuscript and submitted to a Ecofizz 2007 Special Issue of Functional Plant Biology.

Using a cherry picker (right) to access Eucalyptus delegatensis canopies to measure leaf gas exchange at a site near the Tumbarumba flux station located in south-eastern NSW, Australia.

Recently, I worked on an ARC Discovery Project entitled, Mechanisms linking site water status and net primary productivity of Australian woody ecosystems. This ARC project was a collaboration between research groups led by Professors Ross McMurtrie and Mark Adams (University of New South Wales) and Derek Eamus (University of Technology Sydney). Our primary focus in this project was on:

experimental research on the ecophysiology of woody plants at field sites, and
the development of process-based models and application of models to explain mechanisms linking forest productivity to site water status in Australian environments.

I have been applying our Model Any Terrestrial Ecosystem (MATE) model, which simulates carbon and water cycling, to Australian woody ecosystems. MATE is a simpler version of our Generic Decomposition And Yield (G'DAY) forest ecosystem model which simulates carbon, nitrogen and water cycling. Theoretical methods for analysing model behaviour are being used to study the importance of different processes underlying the responses of ecosystems to environmental change.

In earlier research at UNSW I have been developing and applying G'DAY to forest and grassland ecosystems:

These Eucalyptus delegatensis trees (left), that we could access next to canopy openings, are less than 25 m tall; other 40 m tall specimens are growing in this forest.

In my doctoral research I investigated the long term physiological response of Huon pine to changes in atmospheric CO₂ levels and climate using stable isotopes in tree rings. Recently, in collaboration with Assoc. Prof. Brian Atwell at Macquarie University, we have used a 200-year dendro-chronological record from old-growth Huon pine stands in western Tasmania to investigate how past changes in temperature have affected tree growth and nitrogen availability.

My research expertise lies in the following areas: field experimental plant physiology (particularly in measurement of gas exchange and plant-water relations), development and application of process-based models, and computer simulation. I work with C++, Xtran, Fortran, Mathcad and Excel versions of models and their components. I have also delved into web application development which is currently being used for teaching in Population and Community Ecology courses (BIOS3111, BIOS3301)