Dr Tanya Doody

Breathing roots, shifting waters: Tracking tree evapotranspiration in response to hydrological dynamics

Join us for a journey over the last 15 years to understand why measuring water use of riverine trees, using sap flow and water balance methods, provides a robust way to investigate the capacity of trees to respond to altered hydrology. Hear how this method is moving away from the traditional condition index metrics that have been used, to an improved understanding of a tree community’s adaptive capacity to respond to change and when they might be heading to an altered state and require intervention.

Novel assessment of trajectories of change in Murray-Darling Basin riverine tree ecosystems

We explore the utility of panarchy to interpret a ~30 year remotely sensed Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) time series for two floodplain trees; Eucalyptus camaldulensis and E. largiflorens.

A spatial model to monitor the response of woody vegetation to environmental water

Understanding trends of woody vegetation using field evapotranspiration and remote sensing

In this project we are using field collected water use data (evapotranspiration) for River red gum and Black box to calibrate the outputs of a Basin-scale remote sensing evapotranspiration model. Evapotranspiration is a surrogate for vegetation condition, and outputs of this model allow us to observe trends in vegetation condition from 2001 to current time, for each remote sensing pixel in the Murray-Darling Basin. Data can be observed at various intervals depending on the management questions, and include weekly, monthly, seasonally, annually (for example).