Photos by A. Churchill
Amber C. Churchill, Plant-Ecosystem Ecologist
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PAstures and Climate Extremes (PACE)
Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment at Western Sydney University

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 PACE is comprised of two treatments: an extreme winter-spring drought that reduces all precipitation events by 60% and a sustained warming treatment of + 3 degrees C. Taking continuous measurements of plant responses to drought and heating is an important aspect of addressing our research questions at PACE, and in Feb. 2018 we were able to install our phenocams for recording greenness and changes in plant phenology over time. Programing code for these cameras and the image processing is available on BitBucket (Craig Barton) and on GitHub (ACChurchill; Jinyan-Yang) in the coming months.
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Our local newspaper (the Hawkesbury Gazette) ran a great article highlighting the launch of PACE in May 2018- check out this link for details!

Additional project photos and overview information can be found here.


Below is a (partial!) list of the ongoing projects that I am leading associated with the PACE experiment:

Pastures and Climate Extremes: Impacts of warming and drought on the productivity of key pasture species in a field experiment

This paper is now available online- the first of many!
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Nutrient niche partitioning between tropical legumes and grasses under elevated CO2

An experiment designed to test mechanisms of mixed pasture productivity and responses to elevated CO2 conditions using glasshouses at the Hawkesbury Campus at WSU- currently in review and available on BioRxiv as a prepint.
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​Pasture plant-plant competition and nutrient facilitation under extreme drought and warming

Field experimental test of the impact of plant-plant interactions on the consequences to productivity associated with extreme drought and sustained warming
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Detecting shifts in pasture ecosystem health and function under extreme climate conditions using canopy greenness

Field based mounted cameras used to track changes in plant canopy (phenology) throughout the year
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