I am an Honours Student of the School of Life Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney. My Honours research project is exploring the role of biogenic volatile organic compounds on plant flammability. My work focuses on shoot-level analysis using headspace sampling and solvent extraction to characterise the BVOC volatilomes of native dry sclerophyll woodland species in the Blue Mountains City Council region. This research will advance our understanding of how chemical traits contribute to differences in plant flammability. It will also provide new insights into the role of plant volatilomes in wildfire ignition and spread, contributing to better fire prediction and management in fire-prone woodland ecosystems

Name: Mohammed Abdullah A. Alshehri Place of Birth: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Gender: Male Marital Status: Married Mobile: + 966544991237 / +61406800961 Email: mashehri@kacst.gov.sa Email2: mohammed.alshehri@unsw.edu.au Work Address: The Institute of Environmental Protection Technology (IEPT), King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), Riyadh 11442, Saudi Arabia. I am a researcher at the Institute of Environmental Protection Technology (IEPT) Education: • B.S. in Forestry and Range Sciences, Faculty of Meteorology, Environment and Arid Land Agriculture, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. • MSc. in Forest and Nature Conservation, Wageningen University, The Netherlands, 2021. * Currently, I am a PhD student at the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences & Evolution and Ecology Research Centre UNSW, from 2023 to 2027.

An ecologist of micro to macro to human scales, usually in relation to fire. I'm a PhD candidate at CSU but will be presenting my Masters work completed at LTU.

Jakub D. Wieczorkowski is a final-year PhD student at the University of Edinburgh and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. He studies plant diversity in open ecosystems, with fieldwork and research spanning Madagascar, South Africa, Zambia, Brazil, and soon Australia. His work focuses on the herbaceous ground layer—often overlooked in conservation—and explores how fire, climate, and woody encroachment shape species composition and functional traits. He combines field ecology with big datasets, using species distribution data, vegetation plots, and trait databases to understand ecological patterns and support better ecosystem and plant trait classification. Jakub has worked on spatial diversity patterns, plant phenology, role of fire in maintaining biodiversity, and ways to improve how we define and monitor grassy ecosystems. He’s also interested in ecological bias, and how our assumptions shape biodiversity research. He contributes to the Global Grassy Group, where he helps develop shared field methods and resources for studying grassy biomes.

Joshua Burke has recently graduated at Deakin University with an Environmental Science (Honours) degree. He has a passion for Australia’s natural systems forged over a lifetime of hiking and exploration. This passion stirred a career-change in Joshua in 2019, moving from hospitality into a Diploma of Conservation and Land Management with Melbourne Polytechnic. Access to ecological information on a vocational scale stirred an obsession for plant taxa, particularly in niches and adaptations. The abundance of literature following Australia’s cataclysmic megafires of 2019-2020 focused this obsession onto plant-fire ecology, which is the field that Joshua researched for his Honours. Joshua investigated how fire-adapted plants are responding to planned burning in times of altered fire regimes and an ever-changing climate. This research was supported by Parks Victoria and supervised by Tara Lewis, Tricia Wevill and Anthony Rendall. Joshua presently works as a demonstrator at Deakin University and in natural reserve management in the Geelong and Surf Coast areas of Victoria.

Michael is a field botanist and plant ecologist based in Canberra and spent his formative years botanising and bushwalking in the sandstone country of the Sydney Basin. For over 35 years he has worked in the areas of plant conservation, vegetation management and natural resource management with the National Herbarium of NSW, NSW NPWS, CSIRO and since 2016, as a scientific consultant. He currently undertakes a modicum of botanical consulting whilst indulging his passions as a gentleman naturalist and connoisseur of antiquarian bookshops.

My name is Habtamu Getnet Gessesse from Ethiopia. For my Bachelor's degree, I graduated in applied biology, and for my Master's degree, I graduated with Aquatic Ecosystems and Environmental Management from Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. As part of my research, I investigated the effects of water hyacinth on the water quality and the abundance and composition of plankton in the littoral region of Lake Koka, Ethiopia, and published two papers on this topic in reputable journals. I worked as a lecturer and researcher at Hawassa University, Ethiopia, for four years. Since June 2023, I have been studying my PhD on the effects of fire regimes and climate change on plant resprouting in temperate Australia at the University of Melbourne.

I am a recent graduate from the University of Sydney with a deep passion for conservation. I completed my Honours project with Aaron Greenville and Caragh Threlfall on insectivorous bat activity post-2019/2020 megafires in the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area.