研究领域

Application of ecology to management decisions Historic botanic gardens of Victoria Invasions & Biosecurity (coastal weeds, alpine weeds) Plant Ecology (weeds, population dynamics, dispersal) Plant invasions Plant population biology

The main focus of my research group is currently the invasion of Australian coastlines by two sea rockets, one from Europe and N. Africa (Cakile maritima), the other from eastern N. America (C. edentula). In a way analogous to the spread of modern man into regions occupied by Neanderthals, the European species has spread into parts of Australia pre-invaded by the N. American species. As the European species spread, C. edentula was eliminated. Sara Ohadi (PhD student, with Peter Ades and Josquin Tibbits) has uncovered multiple introductions of the European species and bi-directional hybridisation between the two species and introgression from C. edentula into C. maritima. There is still much to do to determine why C. edentula is being displaced, but we have lots of hypotheses to test! Our early work on the two species led to the hypothesis that an obligately out-breeding species (such as C. maritima) could overcome this handicap and spread faster, through transient hybridisation with a native or a pre-invaded self-fertile relative (such as C. edentula). We refer to this as an example of invasion "piggy-backing" of species at the same trophic level. Mohsen Mesgaran, postdoc working on an ARC Discovery grant (with Mark Lewis, Uni of Alberta, and Kathleen Donohue, Duke Uni) is modelling the population dynamics of the system We are now working to obtain more reliable estimates of the model parameters for Cakile. Chengjun Li (PhD student) is studying the inheritance of mating systems in crosses between the two species and back-crosses to the parents. He will also be studying the attractiveness of these to insects. There are great opportunities for further postgraduate research on all aspects of this 3-way interaction between pollinators and plants (and a 4-way interaction with a disease!).

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Ecologically sustainable weed management: How do we get from proof-of-concept to adoption?. Ecological Applications. 26. 2016 Practicable methods for delimiting a plant invasion. Diversity and Distributions. 22. 2016 Genetic structure along the strandline: Unravelling invasion history in a one-dimensional system. Journal of Biogeography. 43. 2016 Floods reduce the prevalence of exotic plant species within the riparian zone: evidence from natural floods. Applied Vegetation Science. 18. 2015 Statistical issues with using herbarium data for the estimation of invasion lag-phases. Biological Invasions. 17. 2015 What we still don't know about invasion genetics. Molecular Ecology. 24. 2015 Experimental design and parameter estimation for threshold models in seed germination. Weed Research. 54. 2014 Here be dragons: a tool for quantifying novelty due to covariate range and correlation change when projecting species distribution models. Diversity and Distributions. 20. 2014