Australian Institute of Alpine Studies Newsletter 02
A newsletter connecting Australian mountain researchers, supported by AMRF.
AMRF Grant Awards
We are thrilled to announce grant awards received by the following AMRF researchers and organisations, to advance their important scientific work in our Australian mountains.
ARC Industry Fellowship: Combining snow science and seed ecology to better manage alpine ecosystems
A/Prof Susanna Venn
This project utilises AMRF infrastructure (FutureClim and DroughtNet) and will recruit several students and research staff. The Key Industry Partner is the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria (Meg Hirst, David Cantrill), and Industry Partners; Parks Victoria (Floret Meredith), and NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (Mel Schroder, Tim Greville, Gen Wright).
Summary: This project aims to determine how ongoing declines in snow affect the growth, development and regeneration of alpine plants. By linking snowpack parameters (depth, density and duration) with growth requirements (light, water and temperature), this project fills an important knowledge gap about how a contraction of the snow season affects spring flowering, seed development, germination, seedling growth and seedling survival through summer. Outcomes include targeted regeneration information for practical rehabilitation works and for conserving alpine plants in-situ and ex-situ. The project will provide tools to promote alpine ecosystem resilience amidst plant life cycle disruptions, of benefit to land managers and stakeholders.
ARC Discovery Grant: Protecting Australian high-country peaty soils by hydrological manipulation
Professor Mark Hovenden, Professor Adrienne Nicotra, A/Prof Duanne White and Dr Lizzy Wandrag
Key Industry Partners include Tasmanian Land Conservancy (Cath Dickson) and NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. This project uses AMRF infrastructure in NSW and TAS, and will also recruit students and research staff as part of its delivery.
Summary: The peaty soils of Australia's high country are vital to ensuring future water security but are under threat from multiple factors. This project aims to produce the knowledge required to safeguard peaty soils in Australia's high country by using a multidisciplinary approach combining vegetation function with the measurement of fluxes and storage pools of carbon and water, enhancing outputs from new infrastructure. Importantly, this project will assess how well subalpine peaty soils can be protected through relatively simple interventions. Expected outcomes include an enhanced ability to predict the resilience of the vital water-storage and filtration services provided by these systems as well as intervention options for improving these.
ARC Discovery Grant: Landscape genomics for adaptable native forest management and restoration
Professor Justin Borevitz, Professor Adrienne Nicotra, A/Prof Carina Wyborn, A/Prof Sarah Clement, Dr Callum Bryant
Key Industry Partners include NSW DCCEEW, Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development, DEECA, Royal Botanic Gardens, Upper Snowy Landcare Network, Greening Australia Ltd and Parks Victoria. Using AMRF infrastructure in NSW, this project will also bring on students and research staff to contribute to its delivery.
Summary: Large-scale forest disturbance and community composition shifts are already observed under climate change, yet land managers, restoration practitioners and policy makers lack essential tools necessary to adapt and enhance forest ecosystem resilience. We will take a three tiered approach, combining landscape community genomics, ongoing restoration efforts, and emergent climate-adaptive management and governance frameworks. By sampling thousands of seed lot trees from extreme environments, we will provide environmental genomic prediction among species necessary for management. The delivered outcome will be a scientifically-informed toolkit for industry and government in responding to vegetation change and repairing degraded ecosystems.
AMRF Project Updates
AMRF Infrastructure Maintenance
Ruined Castle & Cope Hut - Victoria
AMRF instrumentation in the Victorian alpine endures harsh winter conditions, and this season was no exception. High winds folded a solar panel and dislodged the weather station anemometer at the Ruined Castle site. In mid-January, AMRF Coordinator Nathan Battey, field technician Lisa Cary, and AMRF Cadet Rory Ker travelled to the sites to install a replacement solar panel, rewire the solar electronics, and fit a new anemometer, working through a window of fair weather between bouts of hail and storms to keep long-term monitoring records on track.
Images: Nathan Battey, Lisa Cary and Rory Ker
Droughtnet Surveys - ACT
Nathan Battey, Lisa Cary, and Deakin-based AMRF botanist Josh Burke conducted plant community composition surveys across the three ACT Droughtnet sites at Back Flats, Smokers Flat, and Ginini Flats. These experimental plots are situated in montane frost hollows and bogs that burned in the 2019–20 fires. Surveys revealed a diverse mix of native species recolonising the plots, though exotic grasses and herbs were prominent at some sites, underscoring the challenge invasive species pose to native community recovery in these fire-affected systems.
Images: Nathan Battey
AMRF Site visits
NWPS Regional Advisory Council Visit: The NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service Southern Ranges Regional Advisory Committee (RAC), a statutory body that advises the NSW Minister for the Environment on park management, visited AMRF sites earlier this year. This visit follows a presentation given to the committee in 2025 by Professor Adrienne Nicotra (ANU/AMRF Director) which introduced Committee members to AMRF's mission and capabilities. The site visit gave committee members a firsthand look at the infrastructure and the breadth of research it supports, including the FutureClim climate-manipulation system and a common-garden snow gum transplant experiment that will inform conservation decisions around snow gum dieback risk, recovery potential, and whether other species can offset canopy lost to dieback. Committee members were impressed by the scope and relevance of the work underway and were very keen to be able to access the research findings as they emerge. There was strong interest in seeing continued output from facilities like AMRF and the broader TERN network shaped to support action by government entities, giving bodies like the RAC and the Minister's office the evidence base they need to make decisions about how these landscapes are managed.
AMRF site visits by NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service Southern Ranges Regional Advisory Committee.
Image: Adrienne Nictora
Snow Gum Summit 2026: The second Snow Gum Summit was held in Jindabyne on the 14–15 March, 2026. The Summit was convened by Friends of the Earth Melbourne and brought together researchers, land managers, Traditional Owners, and community groups from across the Australian Alps to address the escalating threats to snow gum woodlands, principally climate-change-driven dieback from native longhorn beetles, and increasingly intense bushfire. Attendees of the Summit visited the AMRF Aqueduct site near Perisher Valley. The walk was led by Professor Adrienne Nicotra (ANU/AMRF Director) and gave attendees a firsthand look at the monitoring and experimental infrastructure at the site.
The snow gum flux tower at the site is a closed-path eddy covariance system continuously measuring carbon, water, and energy exchange between the snow gum canopy and the atmosphere. It's characterising the fluxes of a currently healthy stand, which makes it an important baseline as dieback spreads through other parts of the Alps. The site also hosts a climate-manipulation experiment assessing how projected future conditions may affect snow gum growth and establishment. This infrastructure matters well beyond the mountains: high-elevation snow gum forests are responsible for around 30% of flows into the Murray–Darling Basin, so as dieback accelerates, losing that canopy cover has direct consequences for water security across south-eastern Australia. Long-term monitoring like this is essential to understanding what's changing and informing the response.
The Snow Gum Summit walk led by Professor Adrienne Nicotra.
Image: Adrienne Nicotra
Augmenting our hydrological sensing at Tassie AMRF sites
Professor Mark Hovenden, University of Tasmania
In January 2026, a team of us did subsurface mapping in the areas surrounding the two Tasmanian AMON Flux sites, Silver Plains and Wedgetail to guide our installation of an expanded array of hydrological sensors. The mapping and installations were led by Duanne White from the University of Canberra who taught Beth Yates and Mark Hovenden, both from University of Tasmania, much about understanding the hydrological patterns and processes occurring in the landscape. The team had stellar help from Callum Jameson, a final-year student from the Australian National University, who volunteered for a taxing week of long days and hard work.
Over the full week, the team had a fantastic time and installed several piezometer watertable bore holes and full profile soil moisture sensors. This network of sensors will provide essential hydrological data to help researchers to explain and predict patterns in fluxes measured by the two AMRF Tasmanian eddy covariance flux towers. The hydrological sensors will also be crucial in providing an assessment of the impacts of hydrological restoration efforts that will take place as part of the new Discovery Project funded by the Australian Research Council.
At the same time as the hydrological efforts were underway, Michael Chadderton, a PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania, with stellar help from UTas student summer intern Zoe Magnus, completed detailed vegetation surveys of both sites, another crucial dataset that will be used to understand the impact of hydrological restoration on the plant community composition and function of these high country grass- and sedgelands.
Image 1: Duanne White (UC, centre), Callum Jameson (ANU undergraduate summer intern, left) and Bethany Yates (UTas, kneeling) characterising the soil profile at the Wedgetail AMRF flux site in preparation for installing water table level piezometers.
Image 2: Bethany Yates (UTas) preparing a piezometer water table level borehole pipe.
Image 3: A freshly installed soil moisture profile probe at the Wedgetail AMRF flux site.
Image 4: The Tasmanian AMRF team with a freshly-installed water table level piezometer. Left to right: Bethany Yates (UTas), Callum Jameson (ANU undergraduate summer intern), Duanne White (UC) and Mark Hovenden (UTas).
Images: Mark Hovenden
AMRF 2025/2026 Summer Cadetship
The AMRF Summer Cadetship program provided 11 cadets the opportunity to support AMRF’s research and experimental programs, combining fieldwork and campus-based tasks to build practical capability in mountain science.
Over a total of 2383 hours, 4 regions across the ACT, NSW, VIC and TAS, students contributed to 15+ research and monitoring projects, including: hydrology mapping, snow-gum health (borer, moisture, dendrohydrology), provenance trials, alpine insect diversity, plant community sampling, thermal-tolerance experiments, drought/heat phenotyping, pollen studies and dieback assessments.
Below are two experiences shared by AMRF Summer Cadets Shrejal Choudhary and Jasmine Zollinger.
Shrejal Choudhary
“My cadetship work commenced in mid-November, where I initially started with testing thermoelectric modules called Peltier plates for an upcoming field course. I got to make an insulated enclosure for them using foam and glass and developed a better understanding of their function. This was exactly the sort of experience I needed for starting my Honours project the next year, in which I will now include Peltier plates as a key component of my methods. Throughout November and December I went on a handful of field trips supported by different labs, with a majority of them consisting of collecting samples of various types. I was able to learn how to use a number of tools, such as increment borers to collect microcore samples from snow gums in Kosciuszko and LI-CORs to measure chlorophyll florescence and gas exchange in leaves. This cadetship has been truly invaluable to me, as I have become more familiar with the processes of experimental set up and the wide variety of projects I have worked on has informed me of what I would enjoy exploring in my research in the future.”
Jasmine Zollinger
“Exposure to the variety of projects I worked on during my AMRF cadetship has helped clarify my next steps and career direction. Being involved in different stages of research, from field and laboratory work through to data handling and reporting, showed me how environmental science is applied beyond university theory. It helped me identify the types of work I find most engaging, particularly hands-on, applied research that contributes to real-world environmental outcomes. Working across multiple projects also highlighted the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and adaptability and reinforced my interest in roles that combine technical skills with problem-solving in dynamic environments. As a result, I am now more confident in pursuing future opportunities in environmental research, like honours related to snow science and field-based roles, where I can continue to build practical skills while contributing to meaningful environmental research and subsequent management and decision-making for the Australian alps.”
News & Updates
GLORIA Project Fieldwork 2026
A/Prof Susanna Venn, Deakin University
The GLORIA project (GLobal Observation Research Initiative in Alpine environments) is a highly successful, internationally coordinated network monitoring the effects of climate change on alpine summits at a global scale. There have been 200+ sites established on summits worldwide. It takes advantage of the high sensitivity of alpine ecosystems and vegetation to climate change in order to detect how these changes might affect plant life throughout the world.
What’s been happening in Australia?
For the last 25 years Australia has been part of the collaborative global GLORIA project. We have one target region with five summits (Mt Clarke and four peaks down the ridge) on the Main Range in Kosciuszko National Park. The project not only contributes data at a global scale but is informing scientists and land-managers alike about the changes that are occurring in Australian alpine plant communities. The vegetation surveys have now been completed in 2004, 2011, 2019 and 2021, with the most recent survey just completed in January 2026.
Vegetation changes in the Snowy Mountains detected through the GLORIA project include:
An increase in species richness between 2004, 2011, 2019 and 2021, particularly at lower elevation summits
An increase in shrub and graminoid species overall
Elevation identified the main determinant of species composition across the summits
Soil temperature accounts for more than 40% of the variation in composition among summits
Species with localised distributions (local endemics) more common at higher elevations
Highlights from the January 2026 survey:
Over 10 days, 15 people contributed to the field campaign. We encountered almost every kind of alpine weather and the dedicated botanists spent long hours in the evening accurately identifying specimens to add to the dataset. We found 29 new species that weren’t recorded in any of the previous surveys, including two new ferns. In most Summit Area Sections, we recorded more new species than in previous surveys. Gen Wright recorded the highest new total of 61 species in a Summit Area Section at the lowest summit, Clarke 5 (the previous record was 42 in 2019). Alex Martin, supervised by A/Prof Susanna Venn at Deakin Uni, will now be compiling the dataset as part of her Honours project, so stay tuned for results expected in October.
We are extremely grateful for the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service and the Australian Alps National Parks who provided funding to make the 2026 GLORIA field campaign a huge success.
The Australian GLORIA team hard at work!
Images: Susanna Venn
Condition monitoring in the Victorian Alps
A/Prof John Morgan, Research Centre for Applied Alpine Ecology, La Trobe University
This summer, our field program focused on re-measuring long-term plots across the Bogong High Plains, targeting Poa grasslands and gravelly pavement herbfields. These resurveys are part of one of Australia’s longest-running alpine monitoring efforts, allowing us to track how vegetation responds to climate variability, disturbance, and time.
Alpine ecosystems in Australia host some of the country’s most enduring ecological datasets. The best known are Maisie Carr’s grazing exclosure plots - now ~ 80 years old and recognised under the Victorian Heritage Act for their outstanding scientific value. Less widely appreciated is a broader network of permanent plots established from the early 1980s across grasslands, herbfields, and snowpatch communities. These sites are revisited periodically to quantify changes in plant cover, species composition, and bare ground. Together, they provide rare insight into how alpine systems respond to shifting snow cover, rising temperatures, fire, drought, and biotic disturbances.
In 2025/26, resurveys revealed substantial drought-related dieback in Poa grasslands. Interpreting these changes is not straightforward: distinguishing the effects of heat and moisture stress from insect damage depends critically on long-term, repeated observations. Without these datasets, attributing cause would be largely speculative. Monitoring has also recently expanded into long-unburnt (“old growth”) stands of snow gums. Here, we are documenting their landscape position, fuel context, and current condition, including insect dieback. These data will help inform management decisions around conservation value, and ecosystem resilience.
This work is coordinated by the Research Centre for Applied Alpine Ecology, with invaluable contributions from summer research students, namely (in 2025/26) Courtney Meacham and Andreas Molnar. Maintaining and extending these long-term records remains essential for understanding - and managing - change in the Victorian Alps.
Images
Left: Monitoring grassland change on Mt Bogong. Note the extensive dieback of Poa hiemata (Soft Snowgrass).
Middle: Monitoring stand condition of Eucalyptus pauciflora at Pretty Valley on the Bogong High Plains. This stand has missed many of the fires that have occurred over the last two centuries.
Right: Oreobolus pumilo (Alpine Tuft-rush) mats in gravelly pavement herbfields at New Species Gully have been monitored for their dynamics since 1981.
Images: John Morgan
Researcher Highlight
Danny White, PhD Candidate, Deakin University
The latest issue of PARKwatch magazine (Issue #303, Victorian National Parks Association) features a Q&A with Deakin University PhD candidate Danny White, in which he shares an update on his research progress
“My research investigates how climate change in the Victorian Alps—shorter snow seasons, warming, and drought—threatens keystone wetland plants by altering germination and seedling establishment. This work extends to a study on the population genetics of one of the most striking members of spring-fed wetlands – the Silky Snowdaisy (Celmisia sericophylla). On Australia’s highest peaks, hillside springs give life to a unique diversity of plants. These spring-fed habitats are highly restricted in their extent and distribution and support a remarkable diversity of semi-aquatic plants. Many of these are rare and threatened. …
…We’re finding considerable variation in germination responses to different periods of simulated snow cover (periods of cold in the lab) across populations, suggesting that some populations are at more risk of decline than others. Seedling establishment and drought responses appear to also vary considerably. Population genetics results for Silky Snowdaisy show strong genetic clustering by wetlands, strong isolation by distance, and lower rates of clonal reproduction than expected. This demonstrates that seeds (although production is highly variable amongst populations) play an important role in driving population dynamics.”
Danny’s research is supported by Deakin University and the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria.
See the full article here.
Image: VNPA PARKwatch #303
Meet your new research ally
Introducing Dr Piet Arnold - AMRF Data and Experimental Design Consultant, to help out with all things data - see flyer below!
Follow us to stay connected on the latest alpine research using AMRF’s infrastructure.
We will be sharing research updates and outcomes, project milestones, student experiences and opportunities, behind-the-scenes photos of field and lab work, new paper alerts, and conference and events.
You can also stay connected through the AIAS mailing list, to receive regular newsletter updates from AMRF and AIAS. Simply click the link below, select ‘Join the AIAS’, and confirm your subscription via the email sent to your inbox.
Conferences & Events
Upcoming events:
July 2026
AIAS Symposium & AMRF Annual meeting in Canberra - save the date!
Join us for the 2026 AIAS Symposium and AMRF workshop on the 8th - 10th July 2026, in Canberra, the ACT.
Day 1: AMRF Workshop
Day 2: AIAS Symposium
Day 3: AIAS field trip to wrap up the gathering
Our organising team are hard at work tuning the finer details, such as locations, ticket registrations and calls for abstracts - all of which will be coming soon! So please join the AIAS mailing list to stay updated as we continue to send you email updates.
We hope to see you all there!
Past events:
November 2025
Ecological Society of Australia Conference 2025
The following researchers shared alpine insights at the Ecological Society of Australia (ESA) Conference in Adelaide, 23 - 28 November 2025.
Cal Bryant ‘Understanding and responding to climate change-mediated subalpine snow-gum woodland decline’
Lisa Danzey ‘Do elevated night time temperatures during heatwaves help or hinder sub-alpine plant communities?’
James King ‘Above and belowground responses to a future climate in the Australian sub-alpine’
Aaron Midson ‘Linking eddy-covariance observations and ecosystem modelling to understand subalpine woodland carbon dynamics’
Nicholas Porch ‘Darkness pervades the mountains: Throwing light onto invertebrates in montane SE. Australia’
Leon Sims ‘Location Location Location: Alpine microclimatic variation influences flowering and plant-pollinator network specialisation’
Clare Vernon ‘Understanding indicator selection and assessment in terrestrial and alpine Australian ecosystems’
Susanna Venn ‘The condition, threats and future of Australian alpine snowpatch plant communities'
Alan Vincent ‘Modelling climate driven distributional shifts of Eucalyptus species for montane conservation management’
Zoe Xirocostas ‘Handling the heat: Warming alone does not reduce alpine plant survival/reproduction’
Research Opportunities
Post-doctoral Research Fellow - Alpine Ecohydrology
University of Canberra
Are you passionate about understanding how climate change is reshaping alpine freshwater ecosystems? We are seeking a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Alpine Ecohydrology to join the Centre for Applied Water Science (CAWS) at the University of Canberra. Join a collaborative team of freshwater ecologists and hydrologists working at the forefront of ecological research in Australia’s mountain landscapes in this dynamic full time fixed-term opportunity.
See position description here.
Closing date: 11:55pm, Tuesday 28 April 2026
New Paper Alerts
Arnold P, Brown F, Brown Z, Aitken S, Danzey L, Hanley T, King J, Mu X, Osmolovsky I, Sumner E, Williamson V, Xirocostas Z, Leigh A, Moles A, Venn S, Nicotra A (2025) Effective heating chamber design to simulate acute heatwaves and night-time warming for ecological communities under natural field conditions Methods in Ecology and Evolution https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.70114
Campbell P, Harvey N (2026) Climate change driven persistence changes in Australian snowpatches. Geografiska Annaler: Series A, Physical Geography, 1-23.https://doi.org/10.1080/04353676.2026.2635323
Dewenter BS, Giling DP, Shah AA, Hughes J, Poff NL, Ghalambor CK, Funk WC, Bristow S, Thompson RM, Kefford BJ (2025a) Annual Temperature Range Drives Thermal Breadth of Freshwater Insects Across Multiple Spatial Scales. Ecology Letters 28(12), e70288. https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.70288
Dewenter BS, Hughes J, Shah AA, Bristow S, Poff NL, Thompson R, Kefford BJ (2025b) Spatial scale influences relationships between indices of organisms’ thermal tolerance. Journal of Thermal Biology 132, 104226. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtherbio.2025.104226
Dreyer, D, Adden, A, Chen, H, Frost, B, Mouritsen, H, Xu, J, Green, K, Whitehouse, M, Chahl, J, Wallace, J, Hu, G, Foster, J, Heinz, S, and Warrant, E (2025) Bogong moths use a stellar compass for long-distance navigation at night. Nature 643, 994–1000 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09135-3
Hanley TC, Arnold, PA, BRown ZA, Leigh A, Williamson VG, Venn SE,Nicotra AB (2026) Acclimation and de-acclimation of photosystem heat tolerance of alpine plants in response to multiday heat exposure in the field. Journal of Vegetation Science37(1) e70109 https://doi.org/10.1111/jvs.70109
Rowland JA, Ferrer-Paris J-R, Keith D, Murray NJ, Sato CF, Tóth AB, Tolsma A, Venn SE, Amsüssen MV, Pliscoff P, Zambana-Torrelio C, Lester RE, Regan TJ, Nicholson E (2025) Assessing risk of ecosystem collapse in a changing climate. Nature Climate Changehttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02324-y
Venn S.E. and J. Vazquez-Ramirez. In press. Alpine shrubs as facilitators: shrub structure, microsite exposure and site context shape seedling survival and growth dynamics. Alpine Botany.
Xirocostas Z, Moles AT, Brown FM, Brown ZA, Chiarenza GM, Earle R, Leigh A, Mu X, Sumner EE, Venn SE, Williamson VG, Zeng K, Osmolovsky I. (2026) Handling the heat: Warming does not reduce alpine plant survival or reproduction under high precipitation conditions. Climate Change Ecology (11)10011 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecochg.2026.100111
Acknowledging AMRF infrastructure in your publications helps us shine a spotlight on the important work happening across our research community. If AMRF has supported your alpine research, please include us in your acknowledgments - we'd love to feature your work in an upcoming newsletter!
