By the Numbers

Publications per year, by authorship role

Research themes, ranked by size

• Plant functional traits and macroecology 43 papers
  Leaf, wood and whole-plant traits linked to photosynthesis, water–nutrient economics, CO2 responses, community assembly and biogeography across biomes (including tundra). Includes global trait databases, CSR strategies, isotope and soil–climate controls, and functional diversity under environmental change.
  Accounting for functional diversity in biodiversity protection measures (2026) · Predicting decay in functional diversity in plant communities under future climates (2026)
• Decomposition and flammability of plant litter and wood 23 papers
  Trait controls on litter and wood decay, nutrient release, and fuel flammability, including decoupling of decomposability and flammability, effects of environment (arid photodegradation), and improved decay modelling across organs and species.
  Faster than expected: release of nitrogen and phosphorus from decomposing woody litter (2025) · Experimental evidence that leaf litter decomposability and flammability are decoupled across gymnosperm species (2023)
• Global change and land-use impacts 20 papers
  Effects of climate warming and heat extremes, arid-land management, hydrological alteration and land use on species, soils and ecosystems; includes range limits, plasticity in forecasts, artificial reefs, and conservation in modified landscapes.
  Applying the spectral variability hypothesis to arid shrublands using multispectral drone imagery (2026) · Dress for success: climate pressures predict fur insulation and body size in natural and reintroduced populations of a threatened marsupial (2026)
• Citizen science and urban biodiversity monitoring 18 papers
  Use of large-scale citizen science and photographic data to assess biodiversity patterns, data quality, abundance and trend estimation, urban tolerance and restoration, and rapid event response (e.g., fire).
  infinitylists: A Shiny application and R package for rapid generation of place‐based species checklists (2025) · Citizen science records are fuelling exciting discoveries of new plant species (2025)
• Phylogenetics, macroevolution and quantitative methods 11 papers
  Development and application of comparative and theoretical methods, and macroevolutionary studies of angiosperm innovations (freezing tolerance, N2-fixation), with contributions to model adequacy, phylogenetic scaling, and trait variability across sexes.
  A new metric to assess the predictive accuracy of multinomial land cover models (2017) · Phylogenetic comparative methods (2017)
• Mycorrhizae and plant–microbe mutualisms 10 papers
  Ecology and evolution of arbuscular and ectomycorrhizal fungi and legume–rhizobia, including life-history strategies, symbiosis persistence and loss, global colonization intensity, databases, and links to plant flammability.
  Progressing beyond colonization strategies to understand arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal life history (2024) · Bridging reproductive and microbial ecology: a case study in arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (2019)
• Open data, software and ML for traits and communities 9 papers
  Infrastructure, software and machine learning workflows enabling trait extraction from herbaria, taxonomic name alignment, versioned data delivery, and integrated species–traits–environment databases.
  APCalign: an R package workflow and app for aligning and updating flora names to the Australian Plant Census (2024) · Using machine learning to link climate, phylogeny and leaf area in eucalypts through a 50‐fold expansion of leaf trait datasets (2024)
• Termites and deadwood decay 7 papers
  How termites discover and consume wood, their interaction with microbes, and how climate and biogeography shape termite-driven decomposition and carbon cycling across the tropics and drylands.
  Termite discovery disrupts microbial succession and deadwood decay (2026) · Biogeographical Variation in Termite Distributions Alters Global Deadwood Decay (2024)
• Fungal functional ecology and dispersal 6 papers
  Trait-based and experimental studies of non-mycorrhizal fungi, including dispersal cues and allocation, endophyte community structure, competition–cooperation, and links to wood decay.
  Initial wood trait variation overwhelms endophyte community effects for explaining decay trajectories (2022) · Environmental cues for dispersal in a filamentous fungus in simulated islands (2020)
• Biocrusts, lichens and mosses 5 papers
  Biological soil crusts and cryptogams: species-level spectroscopy, tissue chemistry and stoichiometry, large-scale resurvey and future range shifts, and synthesis of transplant experiments.
  Limited range shifting in biocrusts despite climate warming: A 25‐year resurvey (2023) · Towards an understanding of future range shifts in lichens and mosses under climate change (2023)
• Fire ecology and post-fire biodiversity 5 papers
  Plant fire-response strategies and seed thermal thresholds, a national fire-trait database, and multi-taxa fauna and flora responses to the 2019–2020 Australian megafires.
  Continental‐scale empirical evidence for relationships between fire response strategies and fire frequency (2025) · Fire ecology database for documenting plant responses to fire events in Australia (2025)

Theme mix by year

Themes by career period

Each bubble is a theme: x is the mean publication year, y is how many years the theme has been active (span between its earliest and latest paper), size is paper count.