Margie and the rest of the Mayfield Lab had a great time at the Ecology Society of Australia’s annual Conference in Melbourne. Nine of our lab members presented at the conference – great work to all who presented with a mix of presentations, speed talks and posters: Manuel Sevenello, Winnie Siu, Lisa Buche, Hanlun Liu, Wei Lin, Courtney Taylor, Malyon Bimler, Clancy Lester, and Zac Walker.

A big congratulations to Courtney Taylor who won the Australian Flora Foundations Student Prize for Outstanding Spoken Presentation on the Biology of an Australian Plant at the 2024 ESA conference!

We also end the year by sending off Clancy Lester and Ben Stone, who have both recently completed their studies. Clancy and Ben have been vibrant members of the Mayfield Lab over the past 1-2 years, both investigating pollination but in vastly different systems. Clancy’s masters project explored how climate change is affecting the structure and composition of plant-pollinator networks in North East Arnhem Land. Ben’s honours project explored how arthropod and native bee diversity in Grey Box Grassy Woodlands varies across sites at varied states of degradation. Good luck to both on your future ventures!

The field-season in the Western Australian wildflower communities has come to an end for another year – and what a big season it was. Courtney Taylor and Marina Alfano mapped the location of over 80,000 annual plants across their plots near Perenjori, and are now busy in the lab processing many thousands of plant samples to determine fecundity and functional traits of their focal plants. Nande Notyalwa has collected another year of plant community data at our long-running dispersal limitation experiment at Bendering Nature Reserve – this provides an important time-series dataset of how plant diversity and abundance has shifted in response to dispersal limitation over the past 11 years. And finally, Winnie Siu completed the last field season for her PhD (congrats Winnie!) – collecting more from a field experiment examining how soil microbes interact with environmental factors to affect plant performance.

Courtney, Marina, Winnie and Nande had help from a big field-team this year – so a huge thank you to Jake, Malyon, Wei, Nina, Mads, Cliff and Zac for all of their amazing field help and great company throughout the field season.

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.

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.

Also congratulations to Clancy Lester on receiving the Dr Clive Williams OAM Memorial Wildlife Conservation Scholarship for 2024 from the Australian Wildlife Society to aid with genetic components of his Master’s project looking at the structure and composition of pollination networks in North East Arnhem Land. Well done, Clancy!

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.

—

April also saw two publications for the Mayfield Lab group, both lead by PhD Students – Congrats Ali and Isis:

Ali Catling et al. in Journal of Ecology: Individual vital rates respond differently to local-scale environmental variation and neighbour removal

Isis Arend de Silva et al. in Journal of Vegetation Science: Annual species’ experimental germination responses to light and temperature do not correspond with their microhabitat associations in the field