The Ecological Society of Australia and the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) are pleased to announce that austraits (an R package for the Australian plant trait database) is the recipient of the inaugural ARDC Award for New Developers of Open Source Software in Ecology.

The lead applicant was Dr Fonti Kar, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of New South Wales.

“It is rare to come across awards and funding opportunities to support ECRs foster new professional interests and career transitions into areas such as research software development,” Dr Kar said.

“Receiving the award was a massive confidence boost. It reaffirmed that I should continue following my interests in R programming and facilitating research as a software developer.”

“This award will support my professional development in the R software development space. It will allow me to upskill certain aspects of package development and provide me opportunities to connect with other R developers to share ideas and experiences.”

AusTraits is a curated database of plant traits for 28,640 species of Australian flora, which will allow comparative research that can inform ecological management. So far, data has been collated for 448 unique traits, ranging from physiology to morphology which represent ecological adaptations of different plants. The austraits R package was developed to aid the retrieval and application of the AusTraits database in plant ecology research. Since its release, the R package has facilitated crucial evaluations of post-fire recovery traits in Australian flora following the devastating impacts of the 2019-2020 mega fires and has also supported fundamental research in Australian flora that advances our understanding of flowering period across biomes in response to changing climate conditions.

Other members of the team included Elizabeth Wenk, Rachael Gallagher, Daniel Falster, Hervé Sauquet, Gary Truong, David Coleman, Dony Indiarto, Ashleigh Ford, Lily Dun, and Sophie Yang. Congratulation to the entire austraits team!

Read more about Fonti’s work in this recent ARDC interview.

Runner up was Dr Juergen Knauer, a postdoctoral research fellow at Western Sydney University for his ‘bigleaf R package’. bigleaf is an open-source R package with the primary purpose of deriving biometeorological and ecophysiological land surface properties from eddy covariance data and accompanying meteorological measurements. The eddy covariance technique is widely used for measuring the exchange of energy, water, CO2, and other trace gases between the land surface and the atmosphere. Current measurements tell us ‘what’ has happened, but they do not tell us ‘why’ it has happened. The bigleaf R package is designed to shed light on the ‘why’ question.

This award is sponsored by the Australian Research Data Commons in recognition of the valuable contribution made by software to ecological research. It aims to support efforts to develop and share methodology, models and data in ecology and management of Australia’s ecological communities. It also focuses on supporting researchers new to software development, who take on the role of the lead applicant for this award.

First prize is a $4000 research grant and award presentation at the annual ESA conference. The award also includes an additional $1000 towards travel costs and free registration to attend the annual ESA conference.