September – November 2015

Everyone has returned from the field and the Mayfield lab is reunited once more! Last week, we gathered for the Chancellor Circle cup, an annual lawn bowls competition between the Mayfield and Scott labs. We celebrated a great match (we won!) with a barbecue feast hosted by Margie Mayfield and Ethan Scott.

This September, mid-way through fieldwork, Claire Wainwright flew to Hawaii, USA to represent the lab at the 13th EMAPi (Ecology and Management of Alien Plant Invasions) International Conference. There, Claire presented preliminary findings for a review article that our lab members are currently collaborating on. Well done, Claire!

Honours student Thomas Flanagan was also in the field in September and thus could not be in Brisbane for his Honours proposal seminar. As such, Tom delivered his talk remotely from the York-gum woodlands, nature documentary-style! Great job, Tom!

Tim Staples and Travis Britton have also recently returned from a short fieldtrip to WA. With help from Trav, Tim collected functional trait data for his PhD research, which will examine the co-benefits of species diversity and carbon sequestration in forests all around Australia.

Finally, Margie visited the Hovenden Lab at the University of Tasmania last week, and enjoyed a bit of alpine fieldwork. This latest project is part of an international experiment replicated in several mountainous regions worldwide, exploring how plant communities respond to both the immediate effects of climate change as well as ensuing changes in species composition.

 

August 2015

Late winter is peak field season for our Western Australia team working with spring-blooming ephemerals. Claire Wainwright, Victoria Reynolds, Thomas Flanagan and Maia Raymundo are currently out west in the Wheatbelt, WA working on various projects. With guidance from Claire, who is most experienced in this system, Tom is setting up experiments for his Honours project examining the role of competition in plant species coexistence. Meanwhile, Tori circles the vast northern Wheatbelt examining pollinator-mediated interactions between remnant native flora and fields of cultivated canola. Maia is interested in the role of ants in annual plant seed dispersal and community assembly.

This month, Dr Daniel Stouffer, one of our collaborators from the University of Canterbury visited the Mayfield Lab in Brisbane.

Our most recent publication
Smith, T. J. and Mayfield, M. M. 2015. Diptera species and functional diversity across tropical Australian countryside landscapes. Biological Conservation 191: 436-443.

 

June – July 2015

Congratulations to Tim Staples for passing his PhD confirmation!

We are pleased to welcome three new members to our lab. Maia Raymundo and Thomas Flanagan are now part of the team investigating the mechanisms that allow the persistence of species-rich annual plant communities in Western Australia. Travis Britton will be examining drought tolerance in Eucalyptus species, as part of a larger study seeking to understand the role of drought tolerance in mediating tree ranges across the globe.

Our most recent publication
Loy, X., Wainwright, C. E. and Mayfield, M. M. 2015. Asteraceae invaders have limited impacts on the pollination of common native annual species in SW Western Australia’s open woodland wildflower communities. Plant Ecology. Advanced online publication.

 

April – May 2015

Good news: Alexandra Nance recently submitted her Honours thesis and delivered a stunning presentation at the Honours seminar! Allie’s project explored the effects of microbial communities and biological soil crusts on seed germination in several native and exotic annuals found the York gum woodlands of Western Australia. Well done, Allie!

Meanwhile, Margie Mayfield and Claire Wainwright paid a visit to the WA frontline to set up this years experiments for the ongoing projects on assembly in novel plant communities. We are pleased to be currently hosting one of our collaborators on this project, Professor Janneke Hille Ris Lambers, who will be visiting us until early June.

In other news, Lachlan Charles made a short trip to Far North Queensland last month to check on seed traps from his rainforest seed dispersal experiments. This weekend Timothy Staples heads out to the field to conduct baseline vegetation surveys, in sites ranging from the Bunya Mountains all the way north to Gladstone. This will be the first of several field trips for Tim’s PhD work examining functional diversity-productivity relationships in mixed-species forest plantations across Australia.

 

Febuary – March 2015

Alex Haller has been officially awarded his Masters of Philosophy. Tori Reynolds has also recently received Australian Postgraduate Award (APA) and will be rejoining the lab as a PhD student this April. Congratulations to both!

This month we welcome a couple of new members to the team. Dylan Jones will be working on an Honours project looking at the trade-offs between growth and drought-tolerance in Eucalyptus seedlings. Larissa Rocha is a visiting scholar from Brazil who will be with the Mayfield lab until end of this year. Larissa will be working on floral traits of Brazilian and Australian rainforest plants.

 

January 2015

We kick-start the year with some good news! Claire Wainwright has recently submitted her PhD thesis exploring the role of species interactions in shaping novel plant communities found in SW Western Australia. Well done, Claire! In addition, a collaborative research paper including members of the Mayfield lab has recently been accepted in Ecology Letters, and will be an outstanding first publication for lead author Hao Ran Lai. Using empirical evidence this paper shows how different plant invader strategies can generate dramatically different invasion impacts and outcomes.