Mark Westoby

Influential ecologist who has taught at Macquarie University since 1975. He is also the founder of the Genes to Geoscience Research Centre, a federation of research labs aimed at incubating future leaders in research that fuses genomics, functional ecology, earth system science, and paleontology. Westoby is a pioneer of trait-based ecology, which arranges the world's 300,000 plant species into functional types on the basis of their traits. His contributions have defined major dimensions of ecological strategy variation across plant species. He has led a transition to global scale for large quantitative datasets about key ecological traits, and has developed evolutionary cost-benefit theory about leaf lifespan and seed size. Westoby's state-and-transition model has been widely adopted for managing hazards and opportunities in arid zones and rangelands.