Jane Catford
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About
I am a Professor and ARC Future Fellow in the Fenner School of Environment & Society at the Australian National University and a Professor of Ecological Change in the Department of Geography at King’s College London.
I’m an Editor at Ecology Letters. I hold honorary positions at the University of Melbourne and University of Minnesota’s Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve.
Affiliations
Research interests
I am a plant community ecologist with interests in biological invasions, environmental change and biodiversity. I am particularly interested in the causes, consequences and processes of vegetation change, and I typically focus on species invasions to tackle such questions. Human actions can directly and indirectly alter plant community composition, with subsequent impacts on ecosystem structure and function. Increased understanding of the processes maintaining community diversity and driving community assembly could be used to alleviate some of the ecological degradation caused by humans.
I combine fundamental and applied aspects of ecology in my research, using lessons learnt from one perspective to inform the other, and I collaborate widely. I work in terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems, including rivers, wetlands and grasslands, and combine a wide range of theoretical, quantitative and empirical approaches in my research.
Among other work, I lead a multifaceted five-year research project, AlienImpacts, which aims to predict the impacts of alien plant invasions on plant community diversity and is funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant. I run long-term experiments at Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve in the US and in Australia where I coordinate both a NutNet and DRAGNet research site. I am a member of PlantPopNet and have a site in the UK.
More information about my research group and our research interests and projects can be found on our lab website: https://ecologicalchange.org/.