The Ecological Society of Australia is delighted to announce Joel Krauss (Deakin University) as the winner of the 2025 Fundamental Ecology Award, a prestigious $5,000 postgraduate grant that supports innovative student research advancing core ecological understanding. This award recognises projects that address fundamental questions in ecology while contributing meaningful knowledge to Australia’s scientific community.

Joel’s research project – The escape behaviour of threatened Australian mammals across gradients of predation – investigates how nocturnal mammals respond to shifts in predator pressure, with a focus on behavioural adaptations that influence survival. Supported by this award, Joel will undertake fieldwork in remote north-western Australia, where naturally varying fox abundance provides a rare opportunity to examine predator–prey interactions at landscape scale.

Reflecting on the award, Joel said:

‘Receiving the Fundamental Ecology Award from ESA is a huge honour, and I am incredibly grateful for this recognition and the opportunities it creates for my research. I aim to assess life-critical escape behaviours of nocturnal Australian mammals across changing predator environments. Specifically, the funding will facilitate fieldwork in remote Northwestern Australia to assess variation in mammal escape behaviour across a naturally occurring gradient in fox abundance.’

By deepening our understanding of how native species respond to predation, Joel’s work has important implications for conservation management and threatened species recovery – especially as introduced predators continue to impact Australian mammal populations.

ESA congratulates Joel on this outstanding achievement and looks forward to the insights his research will bring to the ecological community.