PhD Candidate
Sarah completed a Bachelor of Environmental Science in Ecology and Conservation at Monash University, and achieved First Class Honours studying a decision support framework for prioritising plant invasions within protected areas.
She has worked as a Research Assistant at Monash University on a project applying the decision support framework to protected areas in Victoria, Australia. This involved examining the presence of alien and invasive plant species, plant dispersal mechanisms and site sensitivity and susceptibility at various protected areas to create both spatially explicit and implicit outputs for prioritising plant invasions.
Sarah’s PhD research is on what drives biodiversity patterns and interactions across multiple trophic levels, and what this means for ecosystem multifunctionality. She will examine the relationships between native and invasive plant species and the soil microbial community to investigate how these interactions influence the ecosystem services these habitats provide.
Her interests in landscape and invasion ecology originate from a desire to be involved in research that will help to increase our knowledge and understanding of interactions across multiple trophic levels and how these interactions will influence biodiversity across a landscape.
Project title: Multitrophic diversity patterns, drivers and interactions, and the influences of biological invasions.