August
August brings the start of the field season for Courtney Taylor and Marina Alfano in the York gum Woodlands of Western Australia. Our study region in the northern Wheatbelt of southwest WA has received above average rainfall this winter, producing an abundance and diverse array of annual wildflowers. It should be a bumper year for flowering and research – good luck out there, Courtney and Marina!
The winter also saw Mayfield Lab members Hanlun Liu, Lisa Buche, and Manuel Sevenello attend conferences in the USA. Lisa and Hanlun attended the Gordon Research Conference on Unifying Ecology Across Scales where they both presented exciting results on soon to be published research. Lisa and Manuel also presented research at the Ecological Society of America 2024 Annual Meeting in Long Beach California.
July
The middle of the year has brought two new Masters students to the Mayfield Lab.
Rachel Wong – Rachele is a Masters student interested in understanding insects’ spatial patterns: where they are and what they are doing. As part of her Masters research, she will be conducting bee surveys across different landscapes in Northern Victoria and assessing the population diversity differences between landscapes. I will also be assessing what plant species bees are foraging on and creating DNA barcodes for the collected bees.
Nande Notyalwa – Nande is a Masters student with experience working at coal-face of conservation with critically endangered ecosystems undergoing habitat fragmentation. Nande is interested in understanding how fragmentation impacts on ecosystems. Her Masters project will investigate how the fragmentation and experimentally limited dispersal affects community composition and functional diversity of ecosystems.
April
The changing weather of April saw the Mayfield Lab visit Dinner Plain for a lab retreat in the Victorian High Country.
It was a productive weekend for all, with plenty of vigorous discussions, collaborative help sessions and the sound of keyboards furiously typing. And it wasn’t all work; the writing was punctuated with some refreshing walks in the subalpine woodlands and plenty of boardgames at night.
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April also saw two publications for the Mayfield Lab group, both lead by PhD Students – Congrats Ali and Isis:
February
Firstly, a huge congratulations to Isis Arend da Silva who has handed up her PhD thesis this month!! Well done, Isis!!
Congrats to postdoctoral research fellow Malyon Bimler too, for leading cracking and insightful paper freshly published in Ecology Letters: Plant interaction networks reveal the limits of our understanding of diversity maintenance
Also, the new year of 2024 welcomes three new students into our lab group:
Wei Lin – Wei is a PhD student in the final year of his PhD, visiting from Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China. Wei’s research investigates role of environmental heterogeneity in biodiversity maintenance. His PhD focuses on species coexistence and biodiversity-ecosystem functioning under rainfall fluctuation scenarios.
Marina Alfano – Marina is starting her Masters looking at how plant identity and diversity impact on the structure of horizontal networks. Marina will be studying this in a field experiment that manipulates the density and diversity of native wildflowers in York gum woodlands of Western Australia. This research will help contribute towards developing useful metrics for horizontal networks which are currently lacking.
Ben Stone – Ben is an honours student who is working on understanding how arthropod diversity is affected by restoration in threatened Grey Box Grassy Woodland ecological communities in northern Victoria. This research will particularly focus on how native pollinator diversity and abundance varies with land use.
