In 2020, the Australian and New Zealand flux research and monitoring network, OzFlux, celebrated its 20 th anniversary by reflecting on the lessons learned through two decades of ecosystem studies on global change biology. OzFlux is a network not only for ecosystem researchers, but also for those ‘next users’ of the knowledge, information and data that such networks provide. Here, we focus on eight lessons across topics of cli...

Dryland vegetation productivity is strongly modulated by water availability. As precipitation patterns and variability are altered by climate change, there is a pressing need to better understand vegetation responses to precipitation variability in these ecologically fragile regions. Here we present a global analysis of dryland sensitivity to annual precipitation variations using long‐term records of normalized difference vege...

We use the Weather Research and Forecast model and estimate anthropogenic heat ( AH ) fluxes based on fine‐scale energy consumption data for Sydney, Australia, to investigate the effects of urbanization on temperature. We examine both the impact of urban canopy effects ( UCE ) and AH which in combination causes the urban heat island effect. Sydney's urban heat island ( UHI ) varies from −1 to >3.4 °C between day and night and...

Regional climate model ( RCM ) simulations are often used with agricultural models to assess the impact of climate change on agriculture. This study assesses the suitability of climate data sets from an RCM ensemble for forcing simulations of wheat yields for New South Wales, Australia, performed using the Agricultural Production Systems sIMulator ( APSIM ). Differences in yields between APSIM simulations forced with RCM outpu...

The southeastern Australian climate and climate variability is driven primarily by large‐scale climate dynamics. How these dynamics translate into local effects is influenced by the nature of the landscape, the vegetation, soil moisture, fire, snow, irrigation and orography. This local land‐atmosphere coupling can enhance or moderate the large‐scale dynamics and have significant influences locally and regionally. This paper re...

Aim To provide the first global quantification of the slope and shape of the latitudinal gradient in seed mass, and to determine whether global patterns in seed mass are best explained by growth form, vegetation type, seed dispersal syndrome, or net primary productivity (NPP). Location Global. Methods We collected seed mass data for 11,481 species × site combinations from around the world. We used regression to describe the la...