INVITED SPEAKERS

Brendan Choat

Professor, HIE - Western Sydney University

Brendan Choat is a Professor at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University. He studies plant ecophysiology with a focus on plant hydraulics and water relations, particularly the impacts of drought on forest ecosystems. Prof. Choat has more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and is listed in the top 1% of Highly Cited Researchers in his field. His research has been published in top-ranked journals including Nature, Science, PNAS, and New Phytologist. He obtained his PhD in the field of plant physiology from James Cook University in 2003. From 2003-2005 he worked as a Post Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University and held a second Post Doctoral Fellowship in the Department of Viticulture and Enology at the University of California, Davis from 2005-2008. He returned to Australia in 2008 to work as a Research Fellow at the Australian National University, before moving to the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment in 2011. He is Editor in Chief for Prometheus Protocols and on the editorial board of the journal Plant Biology. He was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship in 2010 and an ARC Future Fellowship in 2013 for his work on mapping drought response in trees.

Steve Green

Senior Scientist - Plant and Food Research

Steve is a senior research scientist from the Sustainable Production – Systems Modelling group at Plant and Food Research in Palmerston North, New Zealand. Steve holds a PhD degree in Physics from the University of Edinburgh, Department of Forestry and Natural Resources. His research interests that include the design and construction of instrumentation to measure water and nutrient flows through soil, and the development of system models to predict the effect of land use activity on the receiving environment. Steve’s current experimental work in New Zealand is aimed at improved understanding, through measurement and modelling, of the dynamics of water and nutrient flows in orchard systems. Steve is also working on other projects in Kenya (avocados), Dubai (salinity impacts on date palms, forestry and field crops) and Italy (kiwifruit). Steve has been active in environmental research, including sap flow for the past 40 years and has published more than 150 refereed scientific papers. Steve was awarded the 2022 Kiwifruit NZ Innovation Award for his work to understand the impact the kiwifruit industry is having on our land and water resources..

Cate Macinnis-Ng

Professor, University of Auckland

Cate Macinnis-Ng is Associate Professor and Academic Group Leader for the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Group in the School of Biological Sciences at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland. In 2015 Cate received a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship to establish the first forest-based throughfall exclusion experiment in a New Zealand Forest to study the impacts of drought on kauri water use and carbon uptake. Cate is a principal investigator with Te Pūnaha Matatini, the Centre for Research Excellence in Complex Systems. She is Past President of the New Zealand Ecological Society (2018-2019) and Councilor representing the Constituent Organisations for the Royal Society Te Apārangi. She was contributing co-author on Chapter 11 (Australia and New Zealand) for Working Group II of Assessment Round 6 of the IPCC published in 2022.

Rafael Poyatos

Researcher, CREAF

I am Researcher at CREAF (Barcelona, Spain), Humboldt Fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (Jena, Germany) and Adjunct Lecturer at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

My research focuses on plant functioning at multiple spatial and temporal scales, in the context of global change and with a strong focus on trees and forests. In particular, I am interested in understanding plant water and carbon fluxes, studying the interactions between plant traits, whole-plant physiology and ecosystem processes.

I have experience in measuring water and carbon fluxes in Temperate, Mediterranean and Subarctic terrestrial ecosystems. I currently coordinate the SAPFLUXNET initiative (https://sapfluxnet.creaf.cat/), in which we curate the first global database of sap flow measurements and we use it to disentangle the determinants of tree water use and drought responses at the global scale.

Christine Scoffoni

Professor, California State University

Christine Scoffoni is a Professor of Plant Biology in the Department of Biological Sciences at California State University, Los Angeles, and an international leader in research on hydraulic functioning in plants. Christine is French and American, completing her MSc at the University of Bordeaux, and her PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2014. She currently leads a research group that uses experimental and comparative approaches in plant physiology, ecology and evolution to answer fundamental questions regarding the function of plant diversity, with an emphasis on plant adaptation to environmental stresses such as drought. Why do species exhibit such diversity in leaf size, shape and venation architecture? What are the physiological and anatomical traits that drive species’ resistance to drought? Christine’s graduate students and collaborators work on a broad range of questions relating to plant hydraulics and leaf venation architecture, species adaptation to drought, and to the evolution of plant traits.

Benye Xi

Researcher, Beijing Forestry University

I am Benye Xi from Beijing Forestry University, China. My research field is silviculture. I have been focusing on developing innovative and high-efficient forest management techniques based on a deep understanding of tree-water relations, root function, and structure. I am particularly interested in developing and refining the measurement and estimation methods of plant water use in both individual tree and stand scales.