Doctor Suz Everingham
Dr Suz Everingham is a passionate ecologist with broad research interests in the impacts of global change drivers on plants and plant-consumer interactions.
Suz joined the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment as a postdoctoral research fellow in March 2024. Suz is working with Associate Prof Rachael Gallagher and Distinguished Professor Ian Wright, as part of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Plant Success in Nature and Agriculture. She is currently working on a project using large-scale data to combine metrics of drought exposure, drought sensitivity and plant adaptive capacity to create a framework for the extinction risk of plants due to drought. This drought-risk framework will allow more confident predictions of plant extinction risk under climate change scenarios as part of the IUCN Red Listing process.
Suz completed her PhD in 2021 in the Big Ecology Lab, Evolution and Ecology Research Centre, UNSW, Sydney focusing on plant trait responses to recent anthropogenic climate change. She then undertook a postdoctoral research position in the Institute of Plant Sciences and the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Bern, Switzerland from 2021-2024. In this position she co-led a global research collaborative network – BugNet (https://bug-net.org) and with this huge multi-nationality team quantified global-scale drivers of plant-herbivore and plant-pathogen interactions.
Outside of research, Suz is on the Events Committee of the British Ecological Society and the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee of the International Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. She is passionate about mentoring the next generation of ecologists to get involved in exciting and open/reproducible ecological research and she is also a keen science-communicator – ensuring the public is engaged and informed with recent advances in ecology and conservation.
Areas of research/teaching expertise
Ecology; global change biology; plant-consumer interactions; plant functional traits; macroecology; community ecology; species adaptation to climate change; open science
Awards and recognition
Australasian Seed Science Conference, Best 8min Oral Presentation by Student/ECR, 2021
UNSW Evolution and Ecology Research Centre Outstanding Postgraduate Student Award, 2021
Selected as a UNSW Champion of Women in Maths and Science, 2019
First Prize Winner for Outstanding Student Poster Presentation at the Ecological Society of Australia’s annual conference, Launceston, Tasmania, 2019
Winner of the Best Overall Presentation in UNSW Science 1 Minute Thesis competition, 2019
Winner of best postgraduate student Outreach and Communication in Evolution and Ecology, UNSW, 2018
UNSW Evolution and Ecology Research Centre Outstanding Presentation at the UNSW Biological Earth and Environmental Sciences Postgraduate Research Forum, 2018
UNSW Centre for Ecosystem Sciences Outstanding Presentation at the UNSW Biological Earth and Environmental Sciences Postgraduate Research Forum, 2017
Grants
sConsume: How does biodiversity drive disease and herbivory in a changing world?
Co-PIs: Fletcher Halliday, Mayank Kohli
sDiv (Synthesis Centre of iDiv, Germany) Early Career Researcher Working Group Funding (€36,945)
Period: 2023-2025
University of Bern Promotion of Young Researchers Funding, 2022 (CHF 5,575)
Ecological Society of Australia Holsworth Wildlife Research Endowment, 2019-2019 ($13,090 AUD)
Vallette Williams Scholarship in Botany, Australian Plants Society, North Shore Group, 2018 ($1,500 AUD)
Selected publications
Everingham S.E., Offord C.A., Sabot M.E.B. and Moles A.T. (2024), Leaf morphological traits show greater responses to recent changes in climate than leaf physiological traits and gas exchange variables, Ecology and Evolution, 14:e10941.
Robinson M.L., Hahn P.G., Inouye B.D.,…. Everingham S.E.,…. and Wetzel W.C. (2023), Plant size, latitude, and phylogeny explain variability in global herbivory, Science, 382:679-683
Everingham S.E., Chen S.-C., Lewandrowski W. and Plumanns-Pouton E. (2023), Novel and emerging seed science research from early to middle career researchers at the Australasian Seed Science Conference, 2021, Australian Journal of Botany, 71(7):371-378
Everingham S.E., Blick A.J., Sabot M.E.B, Slavich E., & Moles A.T. (2023), Southern hemisphere plants show more delays than advances in flowering phenology, Journal of Ecology, 111:380-390
Auld J., Everingham S.E., Hemmings F.A. and Moles A.T. (2022), Alpine plants are on the move: quantifying distribution shifts of Australian alpine plants through time. Diversity and Distributions, 28:943-955
Everingham S.E. (2021) Book review of the book: Plants of subtropical eastern Australia by Andrew Benwell, Ecological Management and Restoration, 22:292-292
Falster D.S, Gallagher R., Wenk E., Wright I., Indiarto D., Baxter C., … Everingham S.E., … & Ziemiñska K. (2021), AusTraits: a curated plant trait database for the Australian flora, Scientific Data, 8:254
Everingham S.E., Offord C.A., Sabot M.E.B. & Moles A.T. (2021) Time travelling seeds reveal that plant regeneration and growth traits are responding to climate change, Ecology, e03272
Xirocostas Z.A., Everingham S.E. & Moles A.T. (2019) The sex with the reduced sex chromosome dies earlier: a comparison across the Tree of Life, Biology Letters, 16:20190867
Everingham S.E., Hemmings F. & Moles A.T. (2019) Inverted Invasions: Native plants can colonise disturbed urban habitats, Austral Ecology, 44(4):702-712
