We welcome this week to Prof. Hendrik Poorter from the Research Centre Jülich in Germany. Hendrik holds a fractional position at Macquarie University and he will be here with us for one month.
We will have the opportunity to discuss ongoing projects and new ideas.
Looking forward to interesting discussions and welcome Hendrik!!
We had some hard weeks with a lot of field activities in Castlereagh site. Shubham screened more than 15 native species with LiCOR measurements, predawn and midday water potential, leaf and hydraulic traits, etc. Great job Shubham, it was fun to work with you in the field!!
Welcome to our two new lab visitors! Dr Jaume Martinez is a group leader at the Centre for Research in Agricultural Genomics (CRAG) in Barcelona, Spain, and will be visiting our lab until December.
Dr Baoli Fan is a visiting scholar from China who will be in our lab for the next year while she learns about plant adaptations to desert and dryland regions.
This morning the members of the lab had some hands-on training with various instruments that could be used for research, including the LICOR6800, a porometer, fluorometer, sap flow system, soil moisture probe, and PAR sensor. We discussed how these machines work conceptually and had some opportunities to collect data on Eucalyptus and Quercus in the greenhouse!
Members of the Wright’s lab are regularly attending the Sydney Plant Ecpphysiologists meetings at the University of Technology Sydney. This week, Andrea talked about the dual roles of water and soil nutrient availability on plant photosynthetic traits. Very promising results and great talk by Andrea! and interesting discussions over a lovely dinner.
Let’s congratulate Amy Smart and Shubham Chhajed for their outstanding presentations at Macquarie University’s HDR conference.
Amy’s poster focused on biotic interactions affecting reproductive success of Antartic Beech. This work is part of her master thesis and as you can see, even Frank the bear is very proud of it. Well done Amy!!
Shubham gave a very stylish presentation about hydraulic drivers of photosynthetic traits, in the context of least cost theory. He did an excellent job describing the conceptual background and showing some preliminary results. Well done Shubham!!
Dear colleagues,
Interested in remote sensing and plant functional traits?
I am happy to announce the Special Issue on Remote Sensing of Plant Functional Traits in Remote Sensing journal. We welcome studies linking spectral reflectance to plant functional traits. From a remote sensing application perspective, we particularly encourage studies detailing the functional convergency/divergency of specific plant traits across plant forms and environmental conditions. This includes scale studies from proximal sensing up to all the ways to satellite observations.
In addition, we encourage studies covering the following topics:
Dr. Oscar Perez-Priego
Guest Editor
More information under the link:
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/remotesensing/special_issues/plant_traits
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 1 August 2020
Andrea Westerband, a postdoc in the Wright lab, will be a guest editor for an upcoming special issue in Annals of Botany. The special issue will explore the breadth and importance of intraspecific variation in plant traits. New submissions will be accepted until December 2019! Please spread the word!
We are greatly pleased to announce that Ian has been elected as fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.
Congrats Ian – very well deserved!!
The Academy acknowledges his global scale analysis of plant traits and his pioneering work with cutting edge concepts, such as the leaf economic spectrum and least-cost theory.
Rainforests used to cover the majority of Australia when it was a part of the supercontinent Gondwana. Today they exist largely as remnants in fire protected refuges which escaped land clearing pressure.
From December 2018 to April 2019 I have had the pleasure of working in one of these beautiful rainforests at Werrikimbe National Park. The first field trip was a bit of a wash out, literally. There was heavy rain everyday and even some hail! Thankfully, most of the other trips were slightly drier! Despite the weather, my volunteers and I would go out every day, to collect leaf litter, observe birds, identify and measure seedlings. We managed to visit at least 10 different patches of cool temperate rainforest, each with long term seedling monitoring plots, some of which had not been visited in 10 years! Five trips and five months later we were able to collect lots of data for my project on biotic interactions and long lived tree regeneration strategies!
Fig. 1. Looking for birds and flowering trees
Fig. 2. Identifying and measuring seedlings
The Wright Lab (Western Sydney University) 