New team members: Shilu Zheng & James Barr
Welcome to Shilu and James who will be undertaking their PhDs in the Ecosystem Change Ecology team.
Shilu will be working on a collaboration between CSIRO, the University of Western Australia and Zhejiang University. Her doctoral research will investigate the impact of habitat fragmentation on functional structure of subtropical plant communities in the Thousand Island Lake in Zhejiang, China, focusing on intraspecific trait divergence of woody plants on islands. Shilu is supervised by Raphael Didham, Bruce Webber and Mingjian Yu.
James will be undertaking his PhD with CSIRO and Curtin University entitled “Adaptive ecology in the King’s skink, Egernia kingii, in repose to varying levels of predation risk.” This research will aim to identify how this large, social skink endemic to Western Australia, adapts to predators (both native and invasive), and how their anti-predatory responses change following periods of predator isolation. James is supervised by Ruchira Somaweera, Bill Bateman, Stephanie Godfrey and Michael Gardner.
Banner image courtesy of AirPano