Rebecca is a PhD Candidate who is digging into the effects of livestock on ecosystem function in Australia's arid rangelands. Her multidisciplinary research draws on soil chemistry, eDNA, and aboveground plant responses to test whether grazing indirectly affects native plant recruitment and disrupts nutrient cycling and gas fluxes. Her project utilises the TGB (Koonamore) Vegetation Reserve, a unique site that has been free from livestock for 100 years, as an ecological baseline to compare with neighbouring grazed land in South Australia's rangelands.

Rebecca's connection to arid lands began during her undergraduate studies, when she volunteered on the reserve's annual vegetation survey, contributing to Australia's longest-running ecological study. Rebecca is passionately working to revitalise interest in this under-recognised site, demonstrating how grazing-exclusion reserves have immense value for understanding arid ecosystem function, benefiting both conservation and pastoralism. She recognises that conservation in arid lands and pastoralism go hand in hand and works to ensure her research is relevant to both to create practical outcomes that can regenerate arid lands and increase the sustainability of pastoralism.

Watch a snapshot of Rebecca's research to date in the video below