The start of 2025 welcomes two new members to the Mayfield Lab, Monique de Leeuw and Nadia Chinn. Monique is an honours student who will be exploring the impact of invasive species on plant communities in York gum Woodlands. Using network analyses, Monique hopes to determine whether non-native plant communities are structured differently to native-dominated plant communities.

Nadia is a PhD student studying with Prof. Jennifer Firn (QUT) and Margie Mayfield to understand how plant species and communities respond to disturbances such as fire and grazing. Nadia’s work focussed on grassy bands in Bunya Mountain, culturally significant landscapes which are undergoing changes in the absence of right-way fire. Nadia’s PhD will integrate cross-cultural perspectives to investigate how fire regimes impact plant communities, plant functional traits, and plant genetic structure.

In other news, Lisa Buche has had a PhD chapter recently published as a paper in Ecology Letters! Lisa uses computational modelling on field survey data (plant performance, pollinators, and insect herbivores) to show there are a continuum from positive to negative interactions and that guild-­level effects (rather than all pairwise and high-­ order interactions) can be sufficient for accurately describing species variation in plant performance across natural communities.

Congrats Lisa and team! Fine the paper here: https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.70059

A huge congratulations to Lisa Buche and Manuel Sevenello who have both submitted their PhD Theses in the past month. Lisa and Manuel joined the lab in early 2022 when we moved to University of Melbourne and have been a big help in establishing the lab in its new home.

Lisa wrangled some impressive datasets from Western Australia, California and Spain to gain some novel and exciting insights into facilitative interactions. Lisa’s thesis explores the role of facilitation in community dynamics; showing that facilitation is ubiquitous in natural systems, developing novel mathematical frameworks species interactions, and exploring mechanisms of facilitation using functional traits.

Manuel spent two huge field seasons chasing pollinators and plants around the York gum Woodlands in Western Australia. His thesis explores cross-trophic interactions and how they influence plant species coexistence; showing that pollinators can mediate plant-plant interactions and ultimately affect community structure, exploring how fragmentation and agricultural practices shape pollination dynamics in natural reserves, and the consequences fragmentation for mating patterns and genetic structure of a native daisy.

Well done to you both! We wish you all the best with your future!