Postdocs
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jose (Manuel) Sevenello Montagner
Lab member since: April 2021–present
Email: jsevenellomo [at] student.unimelb.edu.au
I am interested in how different landscape elements can alter the relationship between insect pollinators and plants. First, I will explore how neighborhood context and pollinators impact wildflower fitness in natural communities and coexistence consequences in different plant systems around the world. Second, I will investigate how habitat fragmentation and landscape use influence pollen limitation and plant reproductive responses of the unique Southwest Western Australian flora. My PhD study aims to improve our understanding of the biological consequences of landscape fragmentation on native plant population. In the past, I evaluated how different environmental factors influence the phenology and temporal overlap of native spring wildflowers and wild bees.
Lisa Buche
Lab member: October 2021–present
Email: buchel9844 [at] gmail.com | Twitter | Orcid
I am a community ecologist interested in species interactions, network structure and ecosystem stability. My research focuses on understanding the processes that drive biodiversity patterns, particularly the prevalence of positive interactions (facilitation) in grassland communities. As part of my PhD, I am combining empirical data from Spain, USA, and Australia with new modelling tools to integrate higher levels of natural complexity such as multi-trophic interactions, non-linear functional responses, and higher-order interactions. In doing so, I aim to extend current ecological theories to better match empirical observations of community dynamics. In addition to my work in grassland ecosystems, I am also enthusiastic about improving our understanding of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems more broadly. My goal is to develop practical ecology theories that can be applied to a wide range of ecosystems.
(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.
Wei Lin
Lab member: January 2024–present
Email: linw6 [at] mail2.sysu.edu.cn
I am a visiting student from Sun Yat-sen University, China. My main research interest lies in the role of environmental heterogeneity in biodiversity maintenance. My Ph.D research focuses on species coexistence and biodiversity-ecosystem functioning under rainfall fluctuation scenarios. Through a combination of theoretical and experimental approaches, I used eight annual plant species as research objects to explore (i) the contribution of coexistence mechanisms dependent on fluctuations to species coexistence (ii) the contribution of species interactions to variation of BEF relationships and (iii) the correlation between the mechanisms driving species coexistence, the relationship between diversity and productivity, and the relationship between diversity and stability.
Honours and Masters students
George (Clancy) Lester
Lab member: February 2023 – present
Email: glester [at] student.unimelb.edu.au
I’m from Yorta Yorta land in northern Victoria and I am currently researching native bees in North-East Arnhem Land. This research is in collaboration with and for the Yolŋu First Nation people to investigate if observed reductions in stingless bee honey harvests are due to climate change. Prof. Mayfield, Dr. Rachele Wilson and I are using pollen from captured bees to identify the flowers they visit, and in doing so, we hope to paint a picture of the region’s plant-pollinator interactions. Through my Master of Bioscience at the University of Melbourne, I will use DNA metabarcoding to build plant-pollinator networks to analyse the reliance of the ecosystem to climate change.
Marina Alfano
Lab member: February 2024 – present
Email: malfano [at] student.unimelb.edu.au
I am passionate about studying ecosystem dynamics and complexities –particularly plant-plant interactions. For my Master’s I will be investigating how plant identity and diversity impact the structure of horizontal networks. I will be conducting my field work in the native wildflower communities of Western Australia’s York gum woodlands – manipulating the density and diversity of wildflowers in experimental plots. From this research, I aim to develop useful metrics for horizontal networks which will help disentangle how species interact to form diverse plant communities.
Ben Stone
Lab member: February 2024 – present
Email: benjaminjs [at] student.unimelb.edu.au
My name is Ben. Invertebrates, especially insect pollinators (such as bees, butterflies and flies) play a remarkable and crucial role in our ecosystem. They pollinate the majority of the world’s plants, maintain healthy soils, and provide many other services. Despite this, restoration projects often fail to consider insect communities and the services they provide. My research will focus on how insect communities respond to improvements in vegetation condition. To do this, I survey multiple Grey-Box Woodland sites, restored to various stages in Northern Victoria (Yorta Yorta Country). Studying these plant-insect interactions will improve decision making for more resilient and functional ecosystems.
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 fragmentation created by anthropogenic effects on ecosystems, such as agriculture, affects plant communities. Through my Masters research I will investigate how the fragmentation affects plant dispersal and community composition. I aim to use plant functional traits to determine if there are potential shifts in species assemblages, 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 presist as fragments in an agricultural matrix.
Rachel Wong
Lab member: July 2024 – present
Email: rkanami [at] student.unimelb.edu.au
I love advocating for the importance of insects because they facilitate vital ecological processes, such as pollination and decomposition. With climate change on the rise, it is becoming increasingly important to study insects’ spatial patterns: where they are and what they are doing. As part of my Master’s research, I will be conducting bee surveys across different landscapes in Northern Victoria, identifying the species, and then assessing the population diversity differences between the landscapes. I will also be assessing what plant species bees are foraging on and creating DNA barcodes for the collected bees. Outside of my Master’s research, I am a coleopteran enthusiast. Please ask me about coccinellids!
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 and invasive species. Zac has previously worked as a research scientist for the Research Centre for Applied Alpine Ecology. Zac is interested in vegetation dynamics in rare plant communities, the trends and impacts of invasive species, and the effects of climate change on vegetation and ecosystem processes in the Australian alps. Zac is interested in how ecological science can help inform land management and improve conservation outcomes.
Lab Affiliates
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.
Tara Jalali
Lab member: August 2022–present
Email: tara.jalali [at] unimelb.edu.au
I have a research background in plant and pollination ecology, population genetics and agriculture. During my PhD, I investigated how pollinator behaviour impacts population dynamics of hybridising invasive species in genus Cakile. I am currently working as a research scientist at Cesar Australia working on projects such as insecticide resistance aiming to develop innovative, sustainable and integrated management of agricultural pests.
