The Ecological Society of Australia is pleased to announce Joshua Lee as winner of the 2023 Fundamental Ecology Award. Josh is a PhD candidate with Western Sydney University.

“I’ve always loved being out in the bush and been fascinated by how much biodiversity there is to see if you look for it,” Josh said. 

He is bringing that fascination to his PhD, in which he will investigate how the concept of functional diversity can be integrated into private land conservation programs to improve biodiversity stewardship. 

“Species-based measures of diversity, such as the number and identity of species, have historically been the primary indicator for ecosystem condition and conservation value in both science and management,” said Josh. 

“However, to infer complex, multidimensional information about ecosystem function, the composition of species and the ways that they use resources in their environment provides richer information.”

Calculations of this type of functional diversity typically require robust and comprehensive multi-trait data for all species within a community. For Australian plants, AusTraits provides an open-source database of nearly 500 traits across more than 30,000 taxa. Josh’s research recognises that if the trait values contained in such databases are not representative of the variance of that trait across a species’ range, the usability of the data in accurately calculating functional diversity from various locations will be limited.

Funds from the Fundamental Ecology Award will support a field campaign to collect plant traits and test whether existing data in AusTraits (from existing species averages and imputed data) predict plant traits collected in the field. This will provide information on the validity of using plant trait databases in management. 

Josh also aims to test how much functional diversity the monitoring network of his industry partner, the NSW Biodiversity Conservation Trust (BCT), captures relative to NSW vegetation outside the BCT, including in formal protected areas.

“Ultimately, the results from this study will provide recommendations for improving systems of benchmarking to incorporate functional diversity, better enabling policy and management to create and conserve more resilient and ecologically important ecosystems in NSW, Australia and globally,” said Josh.

“Biodiversity is complicated and always changing, so it’s really hard to set goals for conservation that are scientifically robust, scalable, and ecologically meaningful. I think that functional traits, and their diversity, provides a really exciting new framework for quantifying and benchmarking ecosystems that might help with this challenge.”

As part of his award, Josh will present a plenary at ESA2024 in Melbourne in December. 

Runners up were Luke Florence (La Trobe University), Camila Cataldo Mendez (University of Tasmania), Tyler Dornan (University of Adelaide) and Manuel Andres Sanchez-Martinez (James Cook University).

Photo Credit: Ruby Stephens