PhD
Merril Flanary
Lab member since: 2019–present
Email: m.flanary [at] uq.edu.au
I am interested in how to re-initiate ecological function and prioritise land use for forest restoration in Southeast Queensland. I am exploring inexpensive and practical ways to improve site capture by exploring the impacts of planting techniques, soil amendments and soil inoculants and their interactions with tree seedlings. I will also use habitat and land-use change modelling to predict how best to utilise available land for restoration in a changing climate and at different temporal scales. As a practitioner at heart, my aim is to improve the tools available to land managers for successfully implementing forest restoration so that more entities can realise the roles they can plan in restoring native forests in one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots.
(Winnie) Wing Man Siu
Lab member: July 2022–present
Email: wingmans [at] student.unimelb.edu.au
I am originally from Hong Kong where I finished my BSc in Environmental Science and Plant Science. I am passionate about plants and especially in the topics of plant assembly and coexistence – why they occur the way they are that forms the unique flora in an environment. In my PhD research with Prof. Margie Mayfield, I study how plant diversity maintenance is affected by specific mechanisms. In particular, I am interested to know how plant-plant interactions and the outcome of which are mediated by interactions of underground plant structures and soil-microbial communities in the wildflower system in Western Australia. I am excited to explore how natural plant communities are altered by the changing climate and I hope that the application of this knowledge could inform better flora management and conservation.
Courtney Taylor
Lab member: July 2023–present
Email: courtneygt [at] student.unimelb.edu.au
I am interested in asking questions about how species persist in changing environments and in combining empirical observations, ecological theory, and modelling techniques to answer such questions. My PhD research focuses on plant-plant interactions and how these interactions vary in space and time. While it is understood that horizontal interactions – interactions within a single trophic level – play an important role in community assembly and species coexistence, the variation in these interactions has often been overlooked. My work will use spatially explicit performance data from a diverse annual plant system to try and understand how species interactions vary across heterogenous environments. My approach will combine network theory with models of plant population dynamics to try and understand how variation in local interactions contributes to the maintenance of species diversity.
Nande Lungelwa Notyalwa
Lab member: June 2024 – present
Email: nnotyalwa [at] student.unimelb.edu.au
Being from South Africa, I have studied and worked at the coal-face of conservation and have first-hand experience of working within a critically endangered ecosystem that has experienced habitat fragmentation. As a result, I am interested in how habitat fragmentation, created by anthropogenic effects on ecosystems, affects plant communities. One important process that fragmentation disrupts in natural communities is plant dispersal. Through my PhD research, I will investigate how dispersal limitation plant community structure and composition using a long-term dataset. I will use plant functional traits to determine if changes in species assemblages are predictable, and to try and paint a picture of what the future holds within communities. To achieve this aim, I will be working in the threatened York gum-Jam woodlands of Western Australia which currently persist as fragments within an agricultural matrix.
Nadia Chinn
Lab member: November 2024–present
Email: nadia.chinn [at] hdr.qut.edu.au
I am a plant ecologist passionate about understanding how species and communities respond to disturbances such as fire and grazing, as well as integrating cross-cultural perspectives within my research. My PhD focuses on how different fire regimes – including prescribed and cultural burning – impact the evolutionary, functional, and ecological properties of keystone grassland species within the critically endangered ‘grassy balds’ of the Bunya Mountains. I will be working in collaboration with the Bunya Peoples Aboriginal Corporation as well as Queensland Parks and Wildlife who have both reintroduced fire with different intensities, frequencies, and on-ground methods, in part to control the expansion of woody species into the grasslands from surrounding forests. I will employ a combination of genomic, trait based and remote sensing approaches to explore the differential impacts of these fire regimes, as well as understand the mechanisms driving woody encroachment and community assembly within the balds. My research aims to support the conservation of this biodiverse and culturally significant landscape and provide further empirical insights into the role of fire in grassland dynamics.
Elena Kaminskaia
Lab member: May 2025–present
Email: ekaminskaia [at] student.unimelb.edu.au
Elena is interested in the effects of climate change on plant-pollinator interactions, particularly the consequences of warming for microclimates and pollination. She has also studied the joint effects of warming and wildfire-induced reductions in solar radiation on plant-pollinator interactions
Vishwathiga Jayasankar
Lab member: May 2025–present
Email: vishwathiga.jayasankar [at] student.unimelb.edu.au
Vishwa has previously worked on plant–pollinator communities in the southern Western Ghats, where she developed an interest in understanding how these interactions are shaped and affected by environmental change. For her PhD, she is interested in exploring how warming could affect the foraging choices of pollinators and, in turn, influence plant reproductive success.
Andrew McCarthy
Lab member: March 2026–present
Email: andrew.mccarthy [at] student.unimelb.edu.au
My research typically focuses on broad scale ecological questions about the persistence and stability of pollinating insects in threatened/impacted landscapes and agricultural landscapes, with a particular focus on bees and wasps. I am interested in the factors that dictate species success, and utilizing this information to develop species-specific conservation management plans. For my PhD, these impacted landscapes include remnant native grasslands which have been fragmented through agricultural development in Western Australia and urban green spaces in Victoria. My work aims to maximize pollination services and insect diversity in the spaces which typically lack abundant pollinators, but need it most. The goal of my research is to produce practical science which can be used by community members, land managers, and policy makers to inform land use decisions.
Viktoria Wieser
Lab member: March 2026–present
Email: viktoria.wieser [at] student.unimelb.edu.au
I am interested in elusive and understudied mutualistic and antagonistic plant-animal interactions and plant-plant interactions. I did my MSc at the University of Vienna studying ecology and evolution of plants that form acarodomatia for mites to live in. In the Mayfield lab I will investigate the interplay between herbivory and plant species composition in the York Gum Woodlands, particularly regarding seed herbivory. I want to know why some plant species get fed on more than others and if that gets influenced by the neighbouring plant species. Additionally, I will assess plant defenses that may impact herbivory levels, especially on a community scale. Some plants may have a lot of hairs or specialised metabolites to defend themselves against herbivorous insects, but do these defenses also protect their neighbours? To answer my research questions, I will quantify herbivory levels in patches with differing plant species composition and compare them.
Honours and Masters students
Anna Onea
Lab member: July 2024 – present
Email: a.onea [at] student.unimelb.edu.au
Anna is interested in the restoration of native ecosystems. Her research focuses on understanding how restoration impacts the abundance, diversity and function of pollinators in temperature Australian grasslands. The focus of her thesis is how habitat connectivity in remnant grasslands can impact on these pollinator communities.
Lab Manager
Zac Walker
Lab member: May 2022–present
Email: zac.walker [at] unimelb.edu.au
Zac is the lab manager for the Mayfield Ecology Lab. Zac is a plant ecologist interested in community ecology, species interactions and and invasive species. Zac has extensive experience conducting field studies and experiments to understand long-term vegetation dynamics in the Australian Alps and is interested in how ecological science can inform land management to improve conservation outcomes.
Lab Affiliates
Malyon Bimler
Lab member since: 2015–present
Email: malyon.bimler [at] unimelb.edu.au | Website
I am interested in how biodiversity, resilience, sustainability and other fundamental features of our ecosystems emerge out of the complex web of interactions occurring between species. To do this, I employ a mix of complex systems and ecological theory, Bayesian statistics and large datasets to create novel models and frameworks capable of quantifying how dynamic and variable species interactions are, and to explore the emergent consequences of such variability. In my PhD dissertation, I uncovered incredible variation in the magnitude and direction of interactions between wildflower species pairs as a function of the environment. I followed through by quantifying some of the most diverse plant-plant interaction networks to date from those same wildflower communities and under different environmental conditions. In doing so I accounted for certain biological complexities which are often ignored (e.g. plant-plant facilitation, non-linear interactions) due to unclear theoretical expectations for how these factors may play out. Currently, I aim to continue developing network theory for non-trophic systems and explore how facilitation and context-dependent interactions open up new possibilities for understanding how ecosystems sustain, manage and regulate themselves.
Hanlun Liu
Lab member since: August 2022–present
Email: hanlunliu [at] hotmail.com | ResearchGate
I use theory and empirical data to understand how species interaction networks, including the diverse structures and interaction types, shape stability, function and evolution of ecosystems. My PhD work includes analysis of global networks of pollination and tree-tree interactions, revealing how environments strongly impact community stability and biomass stock by changing the structures of species interactions. I apply theoretical models to simulate the coevolution of species in networks when the interaction type shifts, which uncovers how indirect selections by species become weaker as mutualism switches to antagonism. Currently, I plan to explore how plant interactions change between competition and facilitation across heterogeneous environments, and how variability in the types and structures of plant interactions maintain biodiversity in the nature.
Aubrie James
Lab member since: January 2020–present
Email: aubrie.james [at] uq.edu.au | Google scholar
In my dissertation work, I studied annual flowering plants in the genus Clarkia— in particular, how pollinator sharing, spatial variation, and facilitation might affect their coexistence. I used a wide range of tools to do so, including field experiments and observations, dynamic models, and molecular work. More generally, the theme of my work is to ask if overlooking certain biological complexities matters for understanding plant diversity maintenance. Models of coexistence historically simplify community dynamics into equations of pairwise species competition, an abstraction that is often imported back into empirical tests of coexistence theory. As a result, empirical studies of coexistence tend not to focus on things like trophic interactions, mutualisms, spatial heterogeneity, and facilitation in understanding the maintenance of diversity. My work in ecology is to be curious about this: when we include such phenomena into our empirical tests and theory, do we see meaningful changes in our predictions about community diversity?
Tobias Smith
Lab member: 2009–2014, and again from 2019–present
Email: t.smith5 [at] uq.edu.au | Twitter
Tobias undertook his PhD in the Mayfield lab from 2009–2014, investigating the effects of habitat fragmentation on the assembly of bee and fly communities in the tropics, and was also involved in the Mayfield lab’s long-term reforestation project. Since completing his PhD at UQ Tobias has worked as a Postdoc at the Rader Community Ecology Lab (University of New England), working on crop pollination with native bees, and as a entomology lecturer and course coordinator (Queensland University of Technology). Tobias also works as a commercial native stingless bee keeper, primarily through his business Bee Aware Kids. Tobias is the author of The Australian Bee Genera: An Annotated, User-Friendly Key, and teaches bee identification courses at the University of Queensland.
Rachele Wilson
Lab member since: January 2022–present
Email: rachele.wilson [at] uq.edu.au
Rachele is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Queensland and an adjunct in the Centre for Planetary Health and Food Security at Griffith University. Her research focusses on the study of ecological interactions in natural and agricultural landscapes to inform land/animal management. She uses the molecular technique of DNA metabarcoding to identify plants, animals and other organisms from material in environmental samples. Her other sphere of research focusses on sustainable socio-ecological systems, especially practices that support First Nations peoples and Indigenous land management.
Tara Jalali
Lab member: August 2022–present
Email: tara.jalali [at] unimelb.edu.au
During my early studies, I spent significant time in the field, gaining firsthand experience studying plants science. Afterwards, I developed a keen interest for travel. This landed me in Australia where I studied plant ecology and population genetics at The University of Melbourne, focusing on impacts of plant-pollinator interactions on the population dynamics of hybridising invasive Cakile sp. (sea rocket). The opportunity to study abroad led to many exciting learnings about nature and a personal ability to adapt. Currently, I am a lecturer at the School of Biosciences, where I teach different subjects including Ecology and Analysis of Biological Data, and research on plant-pollinators interactions.
