The Ecological Society of Australia and the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) are pleased to announce that ‘bigleaf’ (an open-sourced R package) is the recipient of the 2024 ARDC Award for New Developers of Open Source Software in Ecology.

The lead applicant was Dr Juergen Knauer, an ecosystem and land surface modeller at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment at Western Sydney University. Dr Knauer is interested in vegetation processes and their role in global carbon cycling and the climate system.

The bigleaf R package supports ecological data processing by providing a large range of functions, unit conversions, and metrics that are fundamental to the analysis of eddy covariance measurements.

“Eddy covariance measurements are invaluable for a quantitative understanding of land-atmosphere carbon, water, and energy fluxes and their responses to climate change,” said Dr Knauer. 

“However, these fluxes result from complex interactions among climatic, hydrological, plant physiological, ecological, and other environmental processes, making it challenging to attribute them to underlying drivers. In other words, these measurements tell us ‘what’ has happened, but they do not tell us ‘why’ it has happened. The bigleaf R package was developed to shed light on the ‘why’ question.”

The package facilitates the calculation of functional properties such as canopy conductance, water-use efficiency and temperature responses, that yield deeper insights into the processes driving ecosystem dynamics. This improved understanding helps to interpret changes in land-atmosphere fluxes and offers valuable context for decision-making in land and vegetation management, agriculture, and conservation ecology.

This functionality has already proven valuable across a number of applications, including ecosystem responses to drought, water use, fire behaviour, and carbon sequestration. These applications are beneficial for decision making in land and vegetation management, agriculture, and conservation ecology.

“Winning this award and knowing that the bigleaf R package is valued by ecologists across the country is incredibly motivating,” said Dr Knauer. 

“It encourages me to continue developing this software and hopefully inspires others to use and contribute. Because that’s how I see this project – as a community effort, created by and for the community.”

Other members of the bigleaf team included Thomas Wutzler, Alison Bennett, Soenke Zaehle, Tarek El-Madany, and Mirco Migliavacca.

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.