The following staff are available to supervise honours and masters research in the field of ecophysiology.
Professor Stefan Arndt
Stefan researches how plants and entire ecosystems cope with changes in environmental conditions and with climate extremes like drought or heat stress. He investigates plant performance under environmental stress to predict which plant species will likely survive and thrive in a future climate in forests, revegetation projects or urban areas.
Project topics:
- Adaptations of plants to environmental stresses.
- Plant selection for future climates.
- Mechanisms of plant drought tolerance and tree mortality.
- Greenhouse gas fluxes in natural and agricultural ecosystems.
- Ecosystem responses to climate variability using flux measurements
Dr Claire Farrell
Claire’s research focuses on how we can use plants in green infrastructure (green roofs, facades, rain gardens and woody meadows) to make cities more liveable. Urban greening can provide wide-ranging benefits for human health and well-being, biodiversity, stormwater mitigation and cooling. By understanding how plants function and selecting plants that can both tolerate and thrive in urban landscapes, we can create green and resilient cities.
Project topics:
- Plant selection for green infrastructure (plant traits and tolerances for green facades, raingardens and Woody Meadows).
- Plant selection for naturalistic plantings (plant traits and tolerances).
Dr Nina Hinko-Najera
Nina's research focuses on forest carbon dynamics from monitoring ecosystem-scale carbon and water flux processes to tree growth and quantifying carbon stocks. She is interested in how climate change and variability, disturbances and Traditional Owner-led forest management influence these processes and dynamics. Her research includes field-based data from automated high-resolution to plot-based measurements including ground-based laser scanning and forest growth modelling.
Project topics:
- Quantifying and interpreting tree growth patterns in response to changing climates, disturbance and competition.
- Understanding patterns of forest windthrow after extreme storms.
- Biocultural monitoring of Traditional Owner-managed forests.
- Where does the carbon go? Forest carbon dynamics from uptake to sequestration and release.
- Forest and ecosystem resilience to climate variability, stress and disturbances.
Dr Markus Loew
Markus's research focuses on monitoring ecosystem, forest, and plant responses to their environment. With a focus on automated, continuous, and non- or low-invasive sensors their work ranges from eddy covariance towers to self-built sensors with automated data acquisition and statistical analysis of plant status, growth, and stress.
Project topics:
- Plant responses to their environment.
- Monitoring and quantification of stress at plant and ecosystem level.
- Development of low-power, low-impact sensor systems, development of research infrastructure for flux towers.
- Ecophysiology of plants in the context of forest and agricultural environments.
- Photosynthesis and chlorophyll fluorescence.