Visiting Fellow
ANU WildCountry Research and Policy Hub
Phone: +61 2 6125 4417
Fax: + 61 (0)2 6125 0746
E-mail: sandy.berry@anu.edu.au

Sandy grew up in Bundanoon, southeast NSW and Toowoomba, southeast Queensland where she obtained an Associate Diploma in Laboratory Techniques from the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education. For a decade she worked as a laboratory technician in a range of research institutions. An interest in bushwalking led to a deepening interest in the Australian vegetation and the physiology of plants, and undergraduate studies at Macquarie University.

After completing an Honours degree Sandy came to ANU in 1988 to work as a Technical Officer with the Ecosystem Dynamics Group in the Research School of Biological Sciences. After several years of providing support for field related research she enrolled in a PhD, finally producing her magnum opus: A study of the relationships between climate, carbon dioxide and the vegetation over the Australian continent at the present and the Last Glacial Maximum in 2002. This led to a 3 year post-doctoral fellowship at RSBS with the Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Accounting, followed by her current 3 year appointment at the Fenner School.

Professional Activities

My research is supported by an ARC Linkage Grant between ANU and the Wilderness Society through the WildCountry project. It is concerned with investigating how vegetation cover and productivity changes over time over the whole of Australia, and the impact that this may be having on animal, and particularly bird, distributions. I am particularly interested in how plants and the vegetation respond to environmental change, particularly the direct effect on photosynthesis of the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and the consequences of the vegetation response for the fauna.

Selected Publications

Berry, S.L. and Roderick, M.L. 2006. Changing Australian vegetation from 1788 to 1988: Effects of CO² and land use change. Australian Journal of Botany, 54, 325-328.

Berry, S.L., Farquhar, G.D. and Roderick, M.L. 2005. Co-evolution of Climate, Vegetation, Soil and Air, In: Encyclopedia of Hydrological Sciences, pp. 177-192, Volume 1: Theory, organisation and scale (eds: Blöschl, G. and Sivapalan, M.). John Wiley and Sons Ltd, Chichester, United Kingdom.

Berry, S.L. and Roderick, M.L., 2005. Tansley Review - Plant water relations and the fibre saturation point. New Phytologist, 168, 25-37

Berry, S.L., Roderick, M.L. 2004. Gross primary productivity and transpiration flux of the Australian vegetation from 1788 to 1988 AD: effects of CO² and land use change. Global Change Biology 10, 1884-1898.

Berry, S.L., Roderick, M.L. 2002. CO2 and land use effects on Australian vegetation over the last two centuries. Australian Journal of Botany 50, 511-531.

Berry, S.L., Roderick, M.L. 2002. Estimating mixtures of leaf functional types using continental-scale satellite and climatic data. Global Ecology and Biogeography 11, 23-40.