Joshua Lee

Candidature

PhD Candidate

Thesis title

Beyond species richness: Integrating functional diversity into private conservation programs.

Research Project

Private land conservation provides a unique opportunity to grow our capacity to protect biodiversity, however there is room to expand the definitional space of what elements of biological diversity should be prioritised in achieving conservation outcomes.
My PhD project seeks to integrate the concept of functional diversity into private land conservation across New South Wales that is currently being facilitated by the NSW Biodiversity Conservation Trust. Species-based measures of diversity (i.e., the combined effect of the number and identity of species) have historically been the primary indicator for ecosystem condition and conservation value in both science and management. However, when conservation is exclusively species-based, many components of the nature of biological diversity can be ignored. To infer complex, multidimensional information about ecosystem function, the composition of species and the ways that they use resources in their environment provides richer information. I aim to explore the potential benefit of including functional traits and functional diversity as a supplementary way of capturing variation in ecosystems that is currently missing in existing monitoring programs.
In order to operationalise plant trait data for recommendation in management, it will be important that existing trait information stored in databases is capable of estimating functional diversity at local scales. To explore this problem, I am conducting a field campaign to validate trait values across a rainfall gradient and comparing functional diversity calculations from field measurements with database values.
Functional diversity is also better positioned to provide predictive power for future compositional changes and habitat attributes for other trophic levels as these metrics contain information about the functional attributes that each species contributes to an ecosystem that is not contained with derivatives of species richness. My research will also explore the potential of functional diversity as a monitoring tool for informing broader ecological questions.

Supervisors

Rachael Gallagher, James Brazill-Boast (NSW Biodiversity Conservation Trust), Will Cornwell (UNSW)