Closing 14 March 2025

Plant community completeness in ecological restoration

We offer up to four PhD projects with scholarships in the project ‘Community completeness in monitoring of post-mining restoration success’. The project is a collaboration between researchers from The University of Western Australia, Murdoch University, University of Tartu, Estonia and University of Camerino, Italy, as well as two mining industry partners – Iluka Resources Ltd and Alcoa of Australia Ltd.

This collaborative research between ecologists, statisticians, computer scientists and restoration practitioners will investigate why particular plant species and plant functions are absent from post-mining vegetation, using the ecological concepts of species pools, dark diversity, and community completeness. The projects will be tightly linked, and the successful PhD candidates (and their supervisors) will be working as a team. We will use data from vegetation characterised by contrasting community assembly processes, including species-rich kwongan shrublands and Jarrah forests of Western Australia, myall woodlands and Nullarbor scrub vegetation of South Australian semi-deserts, and species-poor salt-marsh vegetation of South Africa.

Keen to apply? Please visit for details:

https://researchdegrees.uwa.edu.au/scholarships/16x7v0/plant-community-completeness-in-ecological-restoration