Keynote Speakers

Sarah Richardson

Dr Sarah Richardson has been a plant ecologist at Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research for 20 years. One of her main research interests is understanding how and why plant functional traits vary within and among species. She is particularly interested in determining how plant traits vary along environmental gradients, especially soil fertility gradients associated with chronosequences and toposequences. These gradients have been used to showcase the extent to which trait values can vary within a species, and how this intraspecific variation can contribute to functional diversity. Dr Richardson’s research also takes a larger-scale perspective and places the distinctive plant traits found in New Zealand into a biogeographic context to understand the origin and drivers of New Zealand’s island flora, and what factors shape the range of plant strategies found here. She has collected plant functional trait data from leaves, roots, stems and reproductive traits and, more recently, assembled data on phenological traits available through citizen science initiatives. She has analysed these trait data to refine national scale forest carbon stocks, to create functional biodiversity indicators for central government agencies to report on ecological integrity, and to generate maps of nectar availability for the honey industry.

John Innes