Gillis Horner

Monash University (Australia) · School of Biological Sciences, Clayton

1. Multiple pressures (land-use change, water extraction and climate change) interact to influence biodiversity and ecosystem processes, but direct evidence for interactions among multiple pressures is limited. Floodplain forests are an acute example of how interacting pressures (river regulation, water extraction, decreasing rainfall and mammal br...

The Native Vegetation Conservation Act 1997 (NVCA) acknowledged the need for comprehensive vegetation mapping for NSW. Consequently, the New South Wales Government initiated a state-wide program known as the Native Vegetation Mapping Program (NVMP), which was managed through the NSW Department of Infrastructure, Planning and Natural Resources (DIPN...

Most floodplains have been drastically altered by vegetation clearance and river regulation for human needs. In the mid-latitudes, these degraded ecosystems now face the formidable challenge of rapid warming and drying of climates. If the plant diversity of floodplain forests is to be maintained under future climates, their management must be infor...

We review the human actions, proximal stressors and ecological responses for floodplain forests Australia's largest river system---the Murray-Darling Basin. A conceptual model for the floodplain forests was built from extensive published information and some unpublished results for the system, which should provide a basis for understanding, studyin...

Forest ecosystems are increasingly expected to produce multiple goods and services, such as timber, biodiversity, water flows, and sequestered carbon. While many of these are not mutually exclusive, they cannot all be simultaneously maximised so that management compromise is inevitable. We used a 42-year dataset from a naturally regenerating floodp...

River regulation and water extraction have altered the hydrology of rivers resulting in substantial changes to forest structure and the dieback of floodplain forests globally. Forest mortality, due to water extraction, is likely to be exacerbated by climate change-induced droughts. In 1965, a plantation trial was established within a natural floodp...