About

I am a Chancellor’s Research Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney where I study the role of habitat complexity on plants’ ability to adapt to future climate change. I completed my PhD in late 2022 at UNSW Sydney where I also held a short postdoctoral position after. There, I studied different mechanisms that facilitate invasion in plants and how alpine plants are responding to climate change. In general, I have broad research interests across ecology and evolutionary biology and have been involved in multiple collaborations investigating functional traits across ecosystems, plant-animal interactions in response to global change drivers, adaptation in urban environments, and more! I enjoy working across different systems to answer new and exciting questions that will have a meaningful impact on both the scientific community and our precious Earth. I am also an avid science communicator, advocate for women in STEM, and serve on the boards of the Ecological Society of Australia and the Sydney Society for Conservation Biology (former President). I have an unwavering enthusiasm for teaching and supervising (internships, honours, or PhDs) and welcome enquiries from prospective students.


Publications

Xirocostas, Z. A., Ollerton, J., Tamme, R., Peco, B., Lesieur, V., Slavich, E., Junker, R. R., Pärtel, M., Raghu, S., Uesugi, A., Bonser, S. P., Chiarenza, G. M., Hovenden, M. J., Moles, A. T. (2023). The great escape: patterns of enemy release are not explained by time, space, or climate. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 290: 20231022. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2023.1022

Mallen-Cooper, M., Cornwell, W. K., Slavich, E., Sabot, M., Xirocostas, Z. A., Eldridge, D. J. (2023). Limited range shifting in biocrusts despite climate warming: a 25-year resurvey. Journal of Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2745.14169

Moles, A. T., & Xirocostas, Z. A. (2022). Statistical power from the people. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 6(12), 1802-1803. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-022-01902-z

Mallen-Cooper, M., Atkinson, J., Xirocostas, Z. A., Wijas, B., Chiarenza, G. M., Dadzie, F., Eldridge, D. J. (2022). Global synthesis reveals strong multifaceted effects of eucalypts on soils. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 31(8), 1667-1678. http://doi.org/10.1111/geb.13522

Santangelo, J. S., Ness, R. W., … Xirocostas, Z. A., … Johnson, M. T. J. (2022). Global urban environmental change drives adaptation in white clover. Science, 375(6586), 1275-1281. https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.abk0989

Xirocostas, Z. A., Debono, S. A., Slavich, E., & Moles, A.T. (2022). The ZAX Herbivory Trainer – free software for training researchers to visually estimate leaf damage. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 13(3), 596-602. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13785

Xirocostas, Z. A., Everingham, S. E., & Moles, A. T. (2020). The sex with the reduced sex chromosome dies earlier: a comparison across the tree of life. Biology Letters16(3), 20190867. http://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2019.0867