Profile
Kerry-Anne is a DPhil student in the Ecosystems Lab with Prof. Yadvinder Malhi and Dr Nikki Stevens. In May 2024 she took on the role of Ecosystems Programme Assistant alongside her DPhil.
Before beginning her DPhil at Oxford, Kerry-Anne worked as a research assistant and project manager at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, where she worked across the country on plant responses to climate change. She has extensive fieldwork experience, having worked in deserts and semi-deserts, estuaries, farmlands and mediterranean-type ecosystems. During this time, Kerry-Anne supervised honours and masters students at the university and taught on undergraduate and honours courses. Prior to this, she obtained her Bachelor of Science (Hons) in Biodiversity and Ecology from Stellenbosch University and her Master of Science in Conservation Ecology from the University of Cape Town.
Kerry-Anne has also been involved in the science-policy interface, having worked as contributing author on three chapters of the Second Working Group's contribution to the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report. She attended COP27 in Egypt in 2022 as South African delegation overflow and co-convened the Global Alliance of Universities for Climate Change (GAUC) youth delegation's side event here. She is a member of the IUCN's climate change specialist group and has worked with them on reports for national park conservation under climate change and on conservation assessments for the tree Aloes in Southern Africa.
Kerry-Anne is interested in how terrestrial ecosystems respond to climate change, with a particular focus on the physiology and functioning of plants. Her DPhil research focuses on Southern African savanna ecosystems and how dominant trees and grasses in these systems respond to high temperatures under varying levels of water stress. Her research incorporates field-based species-level observational and experimental studies, coupled with remote sensing analyses of ecosystem-scale responses. She is collaborating with South African National Parks and provincial protected areas for this work and aims to provide a better understanding of how these biodiverse systems may change in the future as the climate continues to change.