About the Project
Highland grasslands are a dominant and crucially important component of Australia’s alpine and sub-alpine ecosystems. These communities support unique biodiversity and have enormous aesthetic and emotional appeal. What is perhaps less obvious, however, is that these communities also support soils that are extremely dense stores of carbon, due to their peaty nature caused by the accumulation of undecomposed plant material. These peaty soils are crucial to Australia’s prosperity – capturing, storing, filtering and releasing water worth $A10 billion p.a. to the Australian economy. By absorbing and then later releasing vast amounts of water, these soils help prevent floods during wet periods and keep rivers flowing during drought and their ability to do so is entirely dependent upon their peaty nature. However, highland peatlands are threatened by the combination of a warming, drying climate and historically-installed drainage channels, which could lead to increased loss of soil carbon through changes to plant community composition and function, higher rates of decomposition and reduced carbon inputs.
This project will make use of state of a new landscape-scale experiment that manipulates hydrology in several highland areas in Tasmania, covering a range of plant communities. The project will investigate variation in soil biological composition and function in relation to plant community composition and local hydrology. Approaches will include some or all of field sampling, manipulative experiments and molecular and/or soil function analyses.
The successful candidate will become part of a large multi-institution research program centred around the Tasmanian sites in the Australian Mountain Research Facility. The candidate will be based in the School of Natural Sciences at the University of Tasmania, supervised by Prof. Mark Hovenden and Dr Elizabeth Wandrag, who are collaborating to discover ways that adaptive management can ensure long term sustainability of these ecosystems.
Candidates will need to be Australian or New Zealand citizens or to be eligible for an Australian student visa, possess a full drivers license and have experience working in remote locations.
Funding Notes
This project forms part of a fully-funded program investigating the controllers of ecosystem function of landscapes on organic soils in Australia’s high country. The project involves close collaboration with our industry partner, the Tasmanian Land Conservancy.
