The Ecological Society of Australia is delighted to announce that Dr Elizabeth Wenk, Senior Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales, has been awarded the ARDC Award for New Developers of Open Source Software in Ecology.

Dr Wenk said:
‘My research goals are to better understand the distribution of Australian plants through their traits, both as an academic researcher and as a developer and curator of open-source data products and workflows. I am the project manager for AusTraits, responsible for building a national data asset on the traits of Australia’s 30 k taxa. AusTraits harmonises and merges data from more than 400 distinct datasets, offering a ready-to-use, error-checked data source for researchers worldwide.

‘To build AusTraits, I have also developed supporting infrastructure, including 1) the APCalign R package for aligning and updating taxonomic names to those in the Australian Plant Census; 2) the traits.build R package for building diverse trait databases; and 3) the AusTraits Plant Dictionary, a formal vocabulary that documents explicit definitions for more than 500 plant traits, that can be referenced and reused in many contexts.’

The ESA congratulates Dr Wenk on this achievement and her leadership in building accessible, collaborative tools that strengthen ecological research and conservation outcomes. Her award will be presented at ESA2025 in Adelaide.