July – December 2017
The Mayfield lab welcomed back Maia, Tori, Trace and Abigail from Western Australia after 3 productive months collecting data in the york-gum woodlands. In other news, congratulations to Cath Bowler who completed her honours research and receiving First Class Honours. Cath will be returning to the lab next year to undertake a PhD. Congratulations also to Lachlan, who submitted his PhD thesis on seed dispersal and seedling establishment during early-stage tropical forest recovery within old-fields. Finally, we are sad to note the leaving of lab manger and research assistant Chrissy Elmer. Chrissy was a great asset to the lab we would like to thank her for all her hard work and contribution over the past year and we wish her the best in her future endeavours.
April – June 2017
First off we’re very excited to welcome two new people to the lab! Amy Westman is our new honours student who will be investigating urban pollinators in and around Brisbane. Abigail Pastore is our new postdoc from Florida State University. She’s currently in the final days of her PhD in which she investigated competition and evolution of protozoa. As soon as she arrives in Australia in August she’ll head out to join the WA field crew for data collection in Perenjori.
The WA york-gum woodlands field season has finally arrived; we’ve spent the last couple months organising and planning the trip. The main field crew this year consists of PhD students: Trace, Tori, and Maia. Additionally, Chrissy (lab manager) will be making an appearance for just over two weeks, Abigail will be arriving in mid August, and we have a visiting Masters Student, James, who will be assisting Tori with pollination studies. Everyone will be continuing research on their PhD projects, but, in addition, we’re excited to collect a number of plant traits across species and reserves. These traits will be added to our species trait database which is currently under construction. We’re especially excited to be gathering some field root traits which will hopefully give us insight into how these plants function below ground.
Photo: Maia Raymundo
In preparation for the Perenjori Agriculture Fair we’ve been busy designing Mayfield lab Merchandise. Lead by Trace, we designed some flyers with information on our research in the york-gum woodlands and a guide to some wildflowers of Western Australia (illustrations by the talented Loy Xingwen). We also designed some postcards to hand out at the fair with all photographs taken by past or present lab members. To top it off we also created a banner with our lab logo and favourite lab photos (not pictured), and some lab t-shirts. Stay tuned for some photos of the Agriculture fair and the merchandise in action.
T-shirt, postcards and flyers (front and back)
Photo: Chrissy Elmer
It’s been an exciting couple of months for some of our lab members. Firstly congratulations to Maia Raymundo for being awarded the Joan Allsop Scholarship which she will use to partially fund this year’s field season in WA. Congratulations also to Travis for not only completing honours and achieving First Class, but for also finishing with the second highest mark of the cohort! Travis has decided to stay in the lab, working as a research assistant. This is a massive achievement for both Travis and Maia, Congratulations!
Malyon was recently selected to attend the AMSI (Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute) Winter School 2017 hosted by QUT, focusing on the computational foundations of data science. After two weeks of intensive lectures on various subjects such as inverse problems, Bayesian inference and high-dimensional statistics, Mal hopes that she can put this knowledge to use on some of the large-scale datasets available in ecology. Although she felt many of the topics that were initially covered were far out of her comfort zone, she gained a much stronger understanding of the mathematical constraints and difficulties inherent to analysing noisy data, as well as the theoretical foundations of statistical methods and R packages she uses regularly. Good work Mal!
Photo: AMSI facebook page
Data collection on our new group lab project, gender and publication outcomes in ecology, has finally been completed and we’re currently working on the analysis. Stay tuned for some results. Our last group lab project, a review paper on the links between community ecology theory and ecological restoration, was recently published in Journal of Applied Ecology. Congratulations to all involved.
Finally Margie and Tim will be heading out to the 2017 Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon from August 6 – 11. So if you’re there please say hi!
Follow us on twitter for regular updates of the lab and this year’s field season!
Latest publication
Wainwright, C.E., Staples, T.L., Charles, L.S., Flanagan., T.C., Lai, H.R., Reynolds, V.A. & Mayfield, M.M. 2017. Links between community ecology theory and ecological restoration are on the rise. Journal of Applied Ecology. Dos: 10.1111/1365-2664.12975. link
January – March 2017
Welcome to the new website! A lot has happened in 2017 already! First off, a large congratulations to PhD student, Tori Reynolds, for receiving a Fulbright Scholarship! As part of her scholarship, Tori will travel to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, to help develop new exciting technologies that will enable pollination ecologists around the world to better understand plant-pollinator interactions. You can read more about her research here. Tori was also featured on UQ’s Small Change blog for International Womens’ Day where she wrote about her experience growing up as a female scientist, you can read her article here. Congratulations Tori!
We welcome three new students to the lab this year! Cath Bowler started honours in February and will be looking at the spatial dynamics of higher order interactions in a variety of WA species combinations grown in a controlled environment. Co-supervised with Daniel Stouffer and John Pandolfi, Malyon Bimler recently began her PhD in our lab. She will be modelling the drivers of species co-existance and diversity patterns, focussing on species interactions. Carrie Sims, who is in the second year of her PhD, is also welcomed to the lab and will be investigating species interactions during coral recruitment.
At the end of last year we were sad to see PhD student Steph Creer and Research Assistant Tom Flanagan leave the lab. They both contributed a great deal to the lab and we wish them all the best!
Chrissy Elmer, graduated with first class honours in December last year and has now taken over the role of Lab Manager and Research Assistant for the lab! Her project investigated trade-offs in Tasmanian Eucalyptus seedlings along a water availability gradient.
Travis finally returned from his three months of fieldwork in Tasmania at the start of February, and has already finished processing all of his samples in the lab–congrats Trav! Trace and Maia are currently in WA for a short week of field work.
Finally, Congratulations to Margie and Daniel for having their recent paper on Higher-order interactions published in the new journal Nature Ecology & Evolution!
Latest publication
Mayfield, M. M. & Stouffer D. B. 2017. Higher-order interactions capture unexplained complexity in diverse communities. Nature Ecology & Evolution. 1. link
