The Ecological Society of Australia is pleased to announce Associate Professor John Morgan as the winner of the 2022 Australian Ecology Research Award. Associate Professor Morgan is a plant ecologist with the Research Centre for Applied Alpine Ecology and the Research Centre for Future Landscapes, La Trobe University.

“I am very humbled to be nominated for this award, and to receive it. It’s really nice recognition from your peers that you’re doing something right in your research world. The ESA is dear to my heart, and to my professional life, so this means an awful lot.”

Assoc. Professor Morgan is a leading authority on the ecology of native grasslands in Australia, specialising in understanding how disturbances like fire and grazing determine the long-term dynamics of plant communities.

For more than 25 years, he has worked in the alpine and grassy ecosystems of southern Australia, seeking to understand long-term changes in species composition in the context of climate change, ecological management, land-use change and plant invasions. He has been at the forefront of understanding factors that affect species persistence, testing methods for ecological restoration, and understanding spatial patterns of vegetation change at the landscape-scale.

He has co-ordinated and taught at the annual Alpine Ecology Course for more than 20 years and served as Director of Graduate Research within the School of Life Sciences, La Trobe University, for 15 years. He teaches into five undergraduate subjects across all year levels; and has a particular commitment to field-based teaching so that students gain first-hand experience of ecosystems and plant ecology.

“I always do student judging at ESA conferences because I want to play a role in pumping up good early career researchers and students,” Morgan said.

“I don’t think we do enough of that in general, pumping up the tyres of people who are very engaged and good at what they do but who often don’t get enough recognition for that. It’s why I like the in-person conference because being able to go and drop a kind word to people, especially students, can go a long way to keeping them going. We all have that fear of ‘am I good enough?’ so for someone to come up and give you some reassuring words is really important to help you feel that you belong.”

As part of the award, Associate Professor Morgan will deliver a Plenary at the ESA conference in Wollongong in November.

“I don’t very much go seeking awards and am very much a behind-the-scenes kind of guy so I’m slightly terrified about having to front up and do a plenary,” he said.

“[However] the ESA is a very big family and for me it’s very much been about that community. I’ve been very lucky to have a group of peers who’ve come through with me over the last 28 years, so part of this will be a bit of a shared experience I think. And for my students – I play a role in their career development but they also play a role in mine, it goes both ways, so I’m really chuffed that I get to acknowledge them as well and I’m hoping a lot of them will be there.”

“I think that’s what’s been nice about the ESA, for me it’s the belonging. For me it’s my academic family, outside of the university.”

Assoc. Professor Morgan is an Australian site leader for two international collaborations, ‘NutNet’ (Nutrient Network), a global study of the drivers of grassland diversity; and ‘Drought-Net’, a global study of how and why terrestrial systems differ in sensitivity to drought. ‘NutNet’ has resulted in globally significant analyses and syntheses, and published in prestigious journals including Science, Nature Communications, Ecology Letters, and Ecology.

He serves as Associate Editor for Journal of Vegetation Science, Applied Vegetation Science and Austral Ecology and in June 2022 will become the Co-Editor in Chief of the Australian Journal of Botany. He is also Co-Chair of the ESA Policy Working Group, through which he has led or co-authored numerous submissions on behalf of the ESA to Parliamentary and other inquiries.