Gondwana rainforest, New England National Park NSW. Photo: Tatters Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)
A new PhD research opportunity in assessing the resilience of temperate rainforest communities is now open.
In partnership with the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, NSW Rural Fire Service, the University of Melbourne and Macquarie University, the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC is offering a three year PhD scholarship for a candidate with an Honours or Master’s degree in plant, forest, or environmental sciences.
Using 70 years of plot measurements and three centuries of tree ring records, this PhD research aims to characterise the resilience and sensitivity of temperate rainforest communities to historic disturbance, climate variability and bushfire using a combination of long-term stand dynamic observations, dendrochronology and landscape spatial analysis. The project will examine the consequences of recent unprecedented landscape scale bushfires in northern New South Wales on a world heritage listed ecosystem renowned for its diversity of ancient plant lineages which exhibit few obvious adaptations to increasing fire activity, and will relate to the Informing post-fire recovery planning of northern NSW rainforestsproject.
Jointly supervised by Prof Patrick Baker (University of Melbourne) and Dr Ross Peacock (Macquarie University), this PhD research will have a strong field component and will entail building a compilation of long-term plot data-sources, including data on tree recruitment, growth and morality, fuel equilibrium, micro-climate and tree ring-derived growth time series. The successful PhD candidate will be based in the beautiful north coast forests of NSW and have access to a field-based laboratory and accommodation facility.
The CRC is currently funded until June 2021 and will then transition into a new natural hazards research centre. The way the new centre is structured will determine if the remaining funds from June 2021 are forwarded to the University of Melbourne or transferred to the new centre.