PhD Candidate: Dylan Bristol

PhD Supervisors: Associate Professor Uffe Nielsen (WSU), Professor Jeff Powell (WSU), Dr Yolima Carillo (WSU)

Project Summary: Ecosystem degradation is a common issue that is experienced all throughout Australian ecosystems, especially the Cumberland Plain Woodland, where the impacts of urbanization and industrialization has caused significant losses of native plant diversity, changes to soil biology and function. We do not know exactly how to ameliorate and overcome the impacts of degradation in soils to improve ecosystem functions.

Understanding the current and future threats that will impact soil functions and identifying restoration strategies that influence the resistance and resilience of these functions to the threats is critical for conservation practices.

My objective for this chapter is to understand how plant species diversity and soil biology influences the resistance and resilience of critical soil processes to future climate change events. I will create a pot experiment to see how changes in plant diversity in degraded soils changes ecosystem function rates under extreme weather conditions. I will determine if changes in leaf litter communities impact the microbial communities favourably to native plants, and whether soil inoculation is useful for improving resistance and resilience of soil functions under extreme weather conditions. Furthermore, I will look at the activity of the soil biota after the extreme weather conditions, to see if any amelioration technique also impacts the recovery.