November – December 2014
Congratulations to Margie Mayfield, who was promoted to Associate Professor at the University of Queensland! We are also thrilled for Hao Ran Lai, who was offered a PhD position with the National University of Singapore (NUS) starting January next year.
To celebrate the end of a fruitful year, lab members gathered for a Christmas barbeque/potluck dinner down by the Brisbane River. We also had the final lab meeting of 2014, which ended in a fun slideshow of photos from field trips over the year.
Finally, we bid farewell to several lab members including Tobias Smith, Alex Haller, Hao Ran Lai, Michael Sams and Leander Anderegg.
Our most recent publications
Mayfield, M. M., Dwyer, J. M., Main, A. and Levine, J. M. 2014. The germination strategies of widespread annual plants are unrelated to regional climate. Global Ecology and Biogeography 23: 1430–1439.
Dwyer, J. M., Hobbs, R., Wainwright, C. and Mayfield, M. M.* In Press. Climate moderates release from nutrient limitation in natural annual plant communities. Global Ecology and Biogeography.
Photo: Leander Anderegg
Photo: H R Lai
October 2014
Two big achievements in the lab this month: Alex Haller submitted his Masters thesis and Tori Reynolds submitted her Honours thesis before delivering a stunning Honours seminar. Congratulations to both!
This October, the Mayfield team continues on its travelling spree. Margie Mayfield recently flew to Canberra to attend the Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science awards dinner as an invited guest. Lachlan Charles is currently up north in the Atherton Tablelands putting up more seed traps for his experiments on rainforest seed-dispersal. Meanwhile, Leander Anderegg and Hao Ran Lai are busy with fieldwork in Western Australia, and will soon be joined by John Park. Alexandra Nance also recently returned from her first venture to the WA York gum woodlands, bringing home with her plenty of field data as well as some neat photos.
Photo: T Smith
Photo: H R Lai
September 2014
Warmest congratulations to Tobias Smith on successfully completing his PhD!
This month, Toby, Lachlan Charles and John Park were up north in the Atherton Tablelands to collect soil samples as part of the Thiaki Reforestation Project. Meanwhile, Claire Wainwright, Hao Ran Lai and Loy Xingwen were occupied with field experiments out in the York gum woodlands of Western Australia. In spite of all the travel that has been happening, many lab members turned up to support Alexandra Nance at her Honours proposal presentation, which was superbly executed. Well done, Allie!
Rebecca Parsons (Hobb’s lab, University of Western Australia) visited the Mayfield lab for a week early this month as part of a cross-lab training program. We will also be hosting Leander Love-Anderegg (HilleRisLamber’s lab, University of Washington) till early December this year. Leander is part of a collaborative project between the HilleRisLamber and Mayfield labs on tree range limits and drought tolerance.
Finally, Margie Mayfield and the work of the Mayfield lab was recently featured in Discovery at UQ 2014 (Page 40), an annual report of the University of Queensland’s most prominent research activities.
Photo: T Smith
July – August 2014
The Mayfield lab recently acquired a new research assistant and webpage manager, our recently graduated Honours student Loy Xingwen (myself!). We are also happy for Emma Ladouceur, who recently secured a PhD position with the University of Pavia, and will based at the MUSE Museo delle Scienze in Trento, Italy. Congratulations Emma, and all the best for your future endeavours!
This July, Margie Mayfield was awarded an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, a government scheme supporting outstanding researchers in fields that are of critical importance to Australia. We received this exciting news while Margie, Lachlan Charles and Toby Smith were in Cairns for the Association of Tropical Biology and Conservation annual conference. All gave talks and had a productive time networking. Tori Reynolds also returned safely from a fruitful fieldtrip to the Bunya Mountains and is keen to start on data analysis soon. Michael Sams has just moved back to Melbourne but will be continuing to work remotely with the Mayfield lab until the end of this year. We are also pleased to be hosting Associate Professor Mark Vellend (Université de Sherbrooke), who arrived in early July and will be on sabbatical with the University of Queensland for the next 10 months.
This August, the Mayfield lab welcomes two new members: Alexandra Nance (University of Queensland) and John Park (Yale University). Allie will be working on an Honours project exploring the role of mycorrhizal fungi and biological soil crusts in shaping coexistence between native and exotic annual plants in Western Australia. She is currently busy with her research proposal. John, on the other hand, will be spending plenty of time in the field this month as the lab’s new part-time research assistant/intern. John has just returned from the Western Australian York Gum woodlands with Hao Ran Lai and Loy, but will soon be joining Lachlan and Toby in the Atherton Tablelands (Queensland) to collect soil samples and tree measurements for the Thiaki Reforestation Project.
June 2014
Margie Mayfield has returned to Brisbane after a three-month sabbatical in the US. On Margie’s return, the lab group went away together for a three-day writing and planning retreat. It was a productive trip, and as well as getting plenty of writing and analysis done, we also got lots of time to really get into some deep discussions about ecological theory and the philosophy of conservation. We also ate lots of good food!
Tori Reynolds is off to the Bunya Mountains this month to conduct rainforest vegetation surveys for her honours project, and as always, Lachlan Charles just got back from yet another trip to far north Queensland for his rainforest seed dispersal project.
Photo: T. Smith
Photo: T Smith
May 2014
Congratulations to Loy Xingwen who complete his honours year this month! A big year of fieldwork, stats, writing, and fun. He of course did a marvelous job, and as well as getting some really interesting research results, his hard work will no doubt also pay off with a great mark for his thesis.
In other news, Toby Smith had a quick trip back to Monarto Zoo this month, for another round of insect surveys across the reforestation experiment, and Claire Wainwright has started a huge germination experiment in the lab’s growth chambers. In addition Tori Reynolds has begun supervising the construction of a few large greenhouses at the Ecology Centre’s experimental farm at Pinjarra Hills, where she is conducting part of her tree growth experiment.
Photo: T. Smith
April 2014
This month Lachlan Charles and new lab member Chloe Boyle returned from their big chunk of fieldwork on the Atherton Tablelands, in far north Queensland. The trip was a success, and as well as working on a range of other projects, they managed to construct and install 216 seed traps across the tablelands. Lachlan will go back again in a couple of months to collect the first lot of seed catch. Lachlan is the lab’s resident Master of Seedtraps, having constructed another 400 traps previously during his last lot of fieldwork in Colombia (184 of which were replacements for stolen ones…). Chloe has travelled from Canada to join the lab for a 6-month internship.
March 2014
The Mayfield lab news page has been neglected for a few months… Not for a lack of news though. The author of the Mayfield lab news, me, has been a bit preoccupied in recent months, with finishing a PhD thesis. So, the first piece of news: Congratulations to myself, Tobias Smith, for submitting my thesis in the first week of March (titled: The taxonomic and functional diversity of bees and flies in Australian tropical countryside landscapes). Now I’ll try and stay on top of monthly news once again.
The Mayfield lab has a new member, Victoria Reynolds. Tori has joined the lab to undertake an honours year, in which she is investigating the prevalence of trade-offs between tree growth and drought resistance in trees from SW Western Australia, and the Bunya Mountains, QLD. Her project will see her growing a range of rainforest and sclerophyll tree seedlings, and treating them under experimental watering regimes.
As usual, lab members have been heading off all over the place for fieldwork, and others returning. Claire Wainwright returned, happily, to Brisbane in February after 6 months of fieldwork in Western Australia. Hao Ran Lai has still been traversing back and forward to WA to maintain ongoing experiments, and collect data. Lachlan Charles returned in February, from a summer in rural Colombia establishing part of his pan-tropical rainforest seed dispersal project. He was back in Australia a matter of weeks, and then left to north Queensland to continue his data collection in the Wet Tropics. Nigeria next…! A busy year ahead for Lachlan, which will finish with another Colombia trip.
Currently, our leader, Margie Mayfield, is on sabbatical, during which she has stationed herself at the University of California, San Diego. She is hosted there by her collaborator, Elsa Cleland.
