Robert Kooyman

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• PhD
• Fellow at Macquarie University

Deadwood represents ~11% of carbon stocks in tropical rainforest ecosystems and its decay is driven largely by fungi and termites, which contribute to the cycling of carbon and nutrients. Due to land use change, such as forest clearing, secondary growth tropical rainforests are increasingly prevalent around the globe. In secondary growth rainforest...

Aim: Arbuscular mycorrhizas (AM) and ectomycorrhizas (ECM) have different impacts on nutrient cycling, carbon storage, community dynamics and enhancement of photosynthesis by rising CO2. Recent global analyses have concluded that patterns of AM/ECM dominance in forests worldwide are shaped by climate, with soil nutrients contributing negligible add...

Fossilized plant–insect herbivore associations provide fundamental information about the assembly of terrestrial communities through geologic time. However, fossil evidence of associations originating in deep time and persisting to the modern day is scarce. We studied the insect herbivore damage found on 284 Eucalyptus frenguelliana leaves from the...

The tall eucalypt forests (TEFs) of the Australian tropics are often portrayed as threatened by ‘invasive’ neighboring rainforests, requiring ‘protective’ burning. This framing overlooks that Australian rainforests have suffered twice the historical losses of TEFs and ignores the ecological and paleobiological significance of rainforest margins. Ea...

1. Deadwood represents ~11% of carbon stocks in tropical rainforest ecosystems and its decay is driven largely by fungi and termites which contribute to the cycling of carbon and nutrients. Due to land use change, such as forest clearing, secondary growth tropical rainforests are increasingly prevalent around the globe. In secondary growth rainfore...

Many tree genera in the Malesian uplands have Southern Hemisphere origins, often supported by austral fossil records. Weathering the vast bedrock exposures in the everwet Malesian tropics may have consumed sufficient atmospheric CO2 to contribute significantly to global cooling over the past 15 Myr. However, there has been no discussion of how the...

Biodiversity analyses across continental extents are important in providing comprehensive information on patterns and likely drivers of diversity. For vascular plants in Australia, community‐level diversity analyses have been restricted by the lack of a consistent plot‐based survey dataset across the continent. To overcome these challenges, we coll...

The Southeast Asian rainforest region is extremely complex and biodiverse. Fossils have shown that paleo‐Antarctic rainforest lineages (PARLs) now extant in Asia tracked the ever‐wet conditions needed to survive and diversify through deep time. However, the threat of future climate change to the remaining rainforest and PARLs in Southeast Asia has...

We introduce the AusTraits database - a compilation of values of plant traits for taxa in the Australian flora (hereafter AusTraits). AusTraits synthesises data on 448 traits across 28,640 taxa from field campaigns, published literature, taxonomic monographs, and individual taxon descriptions. Traits vary in scope from physiological measures of per...

The ecology of avian community assembly in subtropical climate areas with seasonal and year-to-year variability is complex and poorly understood. To test for variation in year–year and seasonal (summer–winter) avian community composition and species abundances, we established 10 transects (200 m long) and sampled twice yearly for 7 years. To differ...

Background and aimsRoot-released carboxylates enhance the availability of manganese (Mn), which enters roots through transporters with low substrate specificity. Leaf Mn concentration ([Mn]) has been proposed as a signature for phosphorus (P)-mobilising carboxylates in the rhizosphere. Here we test whether leaf [Mn] provides a signature for root fu...

Refugia play an important role in contributing to the conservation of species and communities by buffering environmental conditions over time. As large natural landscapes worldwide are declining and are increasingly threatened by extreme events, critical decision-making in biological conservation depends on improved understanding of what is being p...

We introduce the AusTraits database - a compilation of measurements of plant traits for taxa in the Australian flora (hereafter AusTraits). AusTraits synthesises data on 375 traits across 29230 taxa from field campaigns, published literature, taxonomic monographs, and individual taxa descriptions. Traits vary in scope from physiological measures of...

Australia’s 2019–2020 mega-fires were exacerbated by drought, anthropogenic climate change and existing land-use management. Here, using a combination of remotely sensed data and species distribution models, we found these fires burnt ~97,000 km2 of vegetation across southern and eastern Australia, which is considered habitat for 832 species of nat...

Aim Palms are an iconic, diverse and often abundant component of tropical ecosystems that provide many ecosystem services. Being monocots, tree palms are evolutionarily, morphologically and physiologically distinct from other trees, and these differences have important consequences for ecosystem services (e.g., carbon sequestration and storage) and...

Aim: Palms are an iconic, diverse and often abundant component of tropical ecosystems that provide many ecosystem services. Being monocots, tree palms are evolutionarily, morphologically and physiologically distinct from other trees, and these differences have important consequences for ecosystem services (e.g., carbon sequestration and storage) an...

The recent fires in southern Australia were unprecedented in scale and severity. Much commentary has rightly focused on the role of climate change in exacerbating the risk of fire. Here, we contend that policy makers must recognize that historical and contemporary logging of forests has had profound effects on these fires’ severity and frequency.

Aim: Large-scale patterns in flower and fruit traits provide critical insights into selection processes and the evolutionary history of plant lineages. To isolate and identify the role of selective pressures including different plant-animal interactions, and the factors driving trait evolution, we investigate convergence and divergence between flow...

Unraveling the origins of Malesia's once vast, hyperdiverse rainforests is a perennial challenge. Major contributions to rainforest assembly came from floristic elements carried on the Indian Plate and montane elements from the Australian Plate (Sahul). The Sahul component is now understood to include substantial two-way exchanges with Sunda inclus...

Hybridisation is a complex process that has important evolutionary consequences. In the case of rare species, a comprehensive understanding of inter-specific hybridisation can be critical for their conservation and management. Eucalyptus tetrapleura is a rare species of ironbark that is restricted to a 40 km × 100 km area around Grafton on the Nort...

Aim To evaluate how biogeographical and ecological processes influenced species distributions and community assembly in a continental rain forest flora with mixed biogeographical origins. Location Continental Australia. Methods We identified 795 species with Sahul ancestry (Australian rain forest flora of Gondwanan origin) and 604 species with Su...

Significance Identifying and explaining regional differences in tropical forest dynamics, structure, diversity, and composition are critical for anticipating region-specific responses to global environmental change. Floristic classifications are of fundamental importance for these efforts. Here we provide a global tropical forest classification tha...

Aim A rich literature on forest succession provides general expectations for the steps forests go through while reassembling after disturbance, yet we still have a surprisingly poor understanding of why the outcomes of forest recovery after logging (or other disturbances) vary so extensively. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that regional spec...

Leaf size varies by over a 100,000-fold among species worldwide. Although 19th-century plant geographers noted that the wet tropics harbor plants with exceptionally large leaves, the latitudinal gradient of leaf size has not been well quantified nor the key climatic drivers convincingly identified. Here, we characterize worldwide patterns in leaf s...

Leaf size varies by over a 100,000-fold among species worldwide. Although 19th-century plant geographers noted that the wet tropics harbor plants with exceptionally large leaves, the latitudinal gradient of leaf size has not been well quantified nor the key climatic drivers convincingly identified. Here, we characterize worldwide patterns in leaf s...

Leaf size varies by over a 100,000-fold among species worldwide. Although 19th-century plant geographers noted that the wet tropics harbor plants with exceptionally large leaves, the latitudinal gradient of leaf size has not been well quantified nor the key climatic drivers convincingly identified. Here, we characterize worldwide patterns in leaf s...

Background Low phosphorus (P) soils have been described as a widespread characteristic of the Australian continent and associated with sclerophyll leaf traits. In that context we ask: what proportion of the continent is low-P and how much does this vary between regions? Methods9234 locations sampled for soil total P from the Australian National Sit...

Soil fertility and vegetation are major drivers of soil communities. Soil community responses to vegetation development and associated changes in soil fertility have been mostly reported for chronosequences that span time scales from decades to centuries. Here we evaluated soil communities for two contrasting chronosequences, the Franz Josef chrono...

A foundation for a DNA barcode reference library for the tropical plants of Australia is presented here. A total of 1572 DNA barcode sequences are compiled from 848 tropical Queensland species. The dataset represents 35% of the total flora of Queensland’s Wet Tropics Bioregion, 57% of its tree species and 28% of the shrub species. For approximately...

Phenotypic traits and their associated trade-offs have been shown to have globally consistent effects on individual plant physiological functions, but how these effects scale up to influence competition, a key driver of community assembly in terrestrial vegetation, has remained unclear. Here we use growth data from more than 3 million trees in over...

Seed dispersal is a key process in plant spatial dynamics. However, consistently applicable generalizations about dispersal across scales are mostly absent because of the constraints on measuring propagule dispersal distances for many species. Here, we focus on fleshy-fruited taxa, specifically taxa with large fleshy fruits and their dispersers acr...

The high species richness of tropical forests has long been recognized, yet there remains substantial uncertainty regarding the actual number of tropical tree species. Using a pantropical tree inventory database from closed canopy forests, consisting of 657,630 trees belonging to 11,371 species, we use a fitted value of Fisher’s alpha and an approx...

• Premise of the study: The diverse early Eocene flora from Laguna del Hunco (LH) in Patagonia, Argentina has many nearest living relatives (NLRs) in Australasia but few in South America, indicating the differential survival of an ancient, trans-Antarctic rainforest biome. To better understand this significant biogeographic pattern, we used detaile...

AimWe take advantage of next generation sequencing-based technology to assess how landscape-level dynamics, biogeographical history and functional factors shape the distribution of genetic diversity in rain forest trees. To achieve this, we explore chloroplast genomic diversity and divergence patterns across multiple, co-distributed species from th...

The high species richness of tropical forests has long been recognized, yet there remains substantial uncertainty regarding the actual number of tropical tree species. Using a pantropical tree inventory database from closed canopy forests, consisting of 657,630 trees belonging to 11,371 species, we use a fitted value of Fisher's alpha and an approx...

The high species richness of tropical forests has long been recognized, yet there remains substantial uncertainty regarding the actual number of tropical tree species. Using a pantropical tree inventory database from closed canopy forests, consisting of 657,630 trees belonging to 11,371 species, we use a fitted value of Fisher’s alpha and an approx...

Unlabelled: • Premise of study: Have Gondwanan rainforest floral associations survived? Where do they occur today? Have they survived continuously in particular locations? How significant is their living floristic signal? We revisit these classic questions in light of significant recent increases in relevant paleobotanical data.• Methods: We t...

Background/Question/Methods There is a pressing need to understand how communities reassemble following human land-use change and how they differ from unmodified communities. It is often assumed that land-use changes and habitat destruction lead to species loss and corresponding loss of functional trait diversity – a common proxy for ecosystem fu...

AGATHIS is an iconic genus of large, ecologically important, and economically valuable conifers that range over lowland to upper montane rainforests from New Zealand to Sumatra. Exploitation of its timber and copal has greatly reduced the genus's numbers. The early fossil record of Agathis comes entirely from Australia, often presumed to be its are...

Identify patterns of change in species distributions, diversity, concentrations of evolutionary history, and assembly of Australian rainforests. We used the distribution records of all known rainforest woody species in Australia across their full continental extent. These were analysed using measures of species richness, phylogenetic diversity (PD)...

1. Plant traits vary widely across species and underpin differences in ecological strategy. Despite centuries of interest, the contributions of different evolutionary lineages to modern-day functional diversity remain poorly quantified. 2. Expanding data bases of plant traits plus rapidly improving phylogenies enable for the first time a data-drive...

The conservation implications of large-scale rainforest clearing and fragmentation on the persistence of functional and taxonomic diversity remain poorly understood. If traits represent adaptive strategies of plant species to particular circumstances, the expectation is that the effect of forest clearing and fragmentation will be affected by specie...

Plant height determines a species’ position in the canopy and regulates access to light. Shifts in trait values for assemblages (plots) arrayed along abiotic gradients can reflect changes in species composition, and shifts in species trait values. Multivariate analysis was used to quantify the relationship of assemblage-level floristic composition...

To compare community assemblage patterns in tropical northeastern and subtropical central eastern Australia across selected gradients and scales, we tested the relationship of species traits with phylogenetic structure, and niche breadth. We considered phylogenetic relationships across current-day species in assemblages in relation to rain forest s...

To compare community assemblage patterns in tropical northeastern and subtropical central eastern Australia across selected gradients and scales, we tested the relationship of species traits with phylogenetic structure, and niche breadth. We considered phylogenetic relationships across current-day species in assemblages in relation to rain forest s...

Data bases that provide continental and global scale information about species distributions provide a valuable resource for environmental, ecological and evolutionary research. However to bring a large dataset to a standard that is suitable for quantitative analysis, data quality needed to be checked. Here we provide a worked example using a large...

Data bases that provide continental and global scale information about species distributions provide a valuable resource for environmental, ecological and evolutionary research. However to bring a large dataset to a standard that is suitable for quantitative analysis, data quality needed to be checked. Here we provide a worked example using a large...

Aim To measure and quantify community phylogenetic structure to evaluate how evolutionary, ecological and biogeographic processes have shaped the distributions and assemblage of tropical and subtropical rain forest tree species across local, regional and continental scales. Location Australia. Methods We used 596 assemblage-level samples and 1137 w...

Australian rainforests contain considerable levels of biodiversity despite representing only a small proportion of the continental land-mass. Broad-leaved vegetation has endured repeated cycles of stress during the aridification of the continent in the last 10Mya, with the remaining refugial areas further filtered during the climatic instability of...

1. Tropical rain forests have more species‐rich tree assemblages than forests at higher latitudes, but is this because they comprise a wider array of niches or functional types? We address this by considering one tree functional type – light‐demanding canopy trees with fast foliage turnover and growth – that is common in the tropics and subtropics,...

1. Plant functional traits are dimensions of ecological strategy variation and provide insights into the assembly of plant communities. For woody rain forest vegetation of northern coastal New South Wales, Australia, we quantified four continuous traits (leaf size, seed size, wood density and maximum height) for 231 freestanding woody species and d...

*When grown in a common light environment, the leaves of shade-tolerant evergreen trees have a larger leaf mass per unit area (LMA) than their light-demanding counterparts, associated with differences in lifespan. Yet plastic responses of LMA run counter to this pattern: shade leaves have smaller LMA than sun leaves, despite often living longer. *W...

Height gain plays an important role in plant life-history strategies and species coexistence. Here main-stem costs of height gain of saplings across species within a rainforest community are compared. Scaling relationships of height to diameter at the sapling stage were compared among 75 woody rainforest plant species in subtropical eastern Austral...

Teeth are conspicuous features of many leaves. The percentage of species in a flora with toothed leaves varies inversely with temperature, but other ecological controls are less known. This gap is critical because leaf teeth may be influenced by water availability and growth potential and because fossil tooth characters are widely used to reconstru...

In rain forests with an intact fauna, moderate-scale disturbance of the canopy (large tree-fall gaps to blowdowns of several hectares) typically gives rise to the following successional sequence: pioneers recruit from the seed bank, grow rapidly to form a closed canopy, but do not recruit under their own shade. As the pioneers senesce, they are rep...

To assess the status of a putative new species of Elaeocarpus L. (Elaeocarpaceae) from north-eastern New South Wales (NSW), with respect to the morphologically similar E. blepharoceras Schltr. from New Guinea, we undertook morphometric analysis of 11 vegetative attributes measured on 11 specimens of the putative new species and eight of E. blepharo...

We describe an approach to multi-species recovery planning and bio-regional biodiversity assessment that uses trait-based plant functional groups as the basis for developing threat/risk assessments for rare, threatened and ‘of concern’ species. Multi-variate methods were used to extract and test emergent groups, and additional information fields re...

Despite their narrow distribution, Australian rainforests still contain considerable levels of diversity and include many ancient, but often rare, lineages. Very little is known about the general biology of rainforest species, yet their long-term management depends on a better understanding of the main factors leading to rarity. For instance, are t...

The long-term effects of logging treatments on rainforest regeneration are difficult to quantify due to compounding interactions between natural dynamics, site characteristics and tree species. The aim of this study was to compare regeneration differences over a 36 year period in stands subjected to various levels of disturbance ranging from natura...

Summary Littoral rainforest in northern New South Wales, Australia, has been severely reduced in area and is now extremely limited in extent. Factors influencing the floristics, species richness and abundance, and relationship of this coastal rainforest community type to other lowland rainforests are explored. The purpose of the study was to provid...

We examined tree diameter growth in 20 plots subjected to various disturbance intensities (natural, low, moderate and intensive logging) in a bid to understand the general tree growth responses in relation to habitat characteristics in subtropical rainforests of north-eastern New South Wales, Australia. Species-specific regeneration strategy, maxim...

The capacity of rainforests to recover from logging disturbance is difficult to model due to the compounding interactions between long-term disturbance effects, natural dynamics, site characteristics and tree species regeneration strategies. The aim of this study was to develop a quantitative model using over three decades of data from stands subje...

Abstract Changes in regeneration patterns in a subtropical rainforest in north-east New South Wales (Australia) are presented for a 12-year period during the 3rd and 4th decades following repeated single-tree selection logging. Changes were investigated using multivariate and univariate approaches. There were no significant differences in floristic...

Eidothea hardeniana (Proteaceae) is a narrow endemic representative of an ancient lineage restricted to a single site in northern New South Wales (Australia). This study aims to identify the life‐history traits most likely to have influenced the current distribution pattern of this rain forest tree. Using ecological and molecular analyses we found...

Weston, P.H.1 and Kooyman, R.2 (1National Herbarium of New South Wales, Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia; 2Earth Process Ecological Services, 220 Dingo Lane, Myocum, NSW 2482, Australia) 2002. Systematics of Eidothea (Proteaceae), with the description of a new species, E. hardeniana, from the Nightcap Range, north-eastern New Sout...

An extensive fauna survey of forest habitats in the Murwillumbah Forestry Management Area of north-eastern New South Wales allowed us to examine and compare the use of Elliott traps, wire cage traps, soil plots, hair tubes, spotlighting, dry pitfall traps, sightings and vocalisations as methods to determine the identity, distribution and abundance...

Recommendations for rainforest regeneration and restoration in different contexts. Planting designs, models, methods, and concepts.