People

Peter Vesk

Peter Vesk

I am an ecologist lecturing in the School of Botany at the University of Melbourne. My research interests cover two areas:

1. Generalisation and research syn­the­sis in ecology and particularly the use of functional traits or groups for explaining ecology.
2. Better ecological management through generalised ecological un­der­stand­ing.

I currently teach in the second year Ecol­ogy course—(654-219) and two third year courses—Field Bot­any (606-310) and Vegetation Con­ser­vation and Management (606-305).

I work mainly with plants partly because they are fascinating—you try foraging, feeding and finding a mate while blindfolded and rooted to the ground!—and partly because they are so important. Vegetation forms most of the biomass and structure of terrestrial ecosystems. For that reason managing terrestrial ecosystems can only be done well if we understand the structure, dynamics and function of vegetation.

I am driven to improve our ecological management through better knowledge and better use of that knowledge. I aim to bridge the gap between field ecology and modelling. Most of my work has some quantitative element to it. I draw on a diverse background in mycorrhizae, cell ultrastructure, metal accumulation and bio-monitoring.

Information on people who have studied or worked with me can be found here. If you are a student and want to find out about opportunities for further study, look at our research or contact me in the lab.

Melinda Moir vacuum sam­pling in­sects from threat­ened under­storey plants in the Stir­ling Ranges, West­ern Aust­ra­lia

Melinda Moir

Melinda is a Research Associate working with Pete to investigate the co-extinction risk of Australian insects on plants. Other collaborators on the project include Mick McCarthy (Botany), Leslie Hughes (Macquarie University) and David Keith (New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife).

Melinda completed a PhD on the return of plant-dwelling insects into restored lands with Curtin University and Alcoa World Alumina. Subsequently she has worked for the Western Australian Museum on short-range endemic invertebrates, Department of Agriculture (Western Australia) on the potential threat posed by exotic invertebrate pest species to Australian agriculture and ecosystems, and School of Forest & Ecosystem Science (University of Melbourne) and the Bushfire Co-operative Research Center on the effects of fire on invertebrates.

Libby Rumpff

Libby Rumpff

Libby is a postdoc working with Pete, Brendan Wintle and Dave Duncan (DSE). She is working on a project which aims to implement an Adaptive Management experiment for restoration of native vegetation in the Goulburn-Broken Catchment. Her research project is a collaboration between the Applied Environmental Decision Analysis (University of Melbourne) and Landscape Logic (DSE) CERF research hubs. It brings together a key research theme for both groups, which is the need to develop science-based tools and methods to improve decision making for natural resource managers. Prior to this Libby has worked with Landscape Logic to develop and test field methods capable of reliably detecting change in native vegetation quality. She also really loves the Alps, and did her PhD research looking at “The influence of climate and disturbance on alpine tree-line dynamics in the Victorian Alps, Australia”. You can ask her about that too and she will talk for ages.

Jane Catford

Jane Catford

Jane is a research fellow and plant ecologist with interests in freshwater and invasion ecology, and ecological theory. For her PhD (completed in 2008), she examined factors that influence plant community composition and exotic invasion in floodplain wetlands along the regulated Murray River, south-eastern Australia. Biological invasion operates as a real-life, uncontrolled experiment in community assembly, by altering community composition, and can provide insight into landscape, succession and community ecology, and conservation biology. Working at the landscape-scale increases understanding of factors that affect invasion and can guide management. If environmental characteristics affect biological invasion, management of the environment should provide a way to manage invaders. As a research fellow, she is assessing whether propagule pressure and abiotic characteristics can be used to predict habitats and areas susceptible to exotic plant invasion in Victoria.

Yung En Chee

Yung is a post-doc working on the riverine restoration project.

Yung has most recently been working on a monitoring scheme for environmental flows in Victorian rivers for the e-water CRC and DSE. Yung completed her PhD in the Environmental Science Lab with Mark Burgman. In that project she developed models for environmental flows and ecological risk assessment.

Cassia in front of Cassia (now renamed Senna)

Cassia Read

Cassia is doing a PhD co-supervised by Jane Elith, Mark Burgman, John Morgan (La Trobe) and Pete. Her project is titled “The role of biological soil crusts in vegetation dynamics of the Murray Mallee bioregion, Victoria.”

The biological soil crust is the diverse community of moss, lichen, algae, fungi and cyanobacteria, existing at the soil surface in ecosystems of low canopy cover. Although the biological crust has been linked to ecological functions such as nutrient cycling, soil stability and seedling establishment the functional importance of the biological crust in landscape health is still poorly understood, particularly its role in vegetation dynamics of hot deserts such as in Australia. There have been very few surveys documenting patterns in the composition and distribution of soil crusts in Victoria. Further, the role of soil crusts in establishment and survival of vascular plants in Australia is largely unstudied, despite significant implications for the management of remnant vegetation. This project will explore through field work and statistical modelling, patterns in the distribution and composition of biological soil crust in the Murray Mallee bioregion of Victoria. This project will go on to investigate the role of the crust in the germination and establishment of vascular plants through field and glass-house trials. Finally this project will synthesise results from this study and the scientific literature to develop a model of the role of biological crusts in vegetation dynamics of the Murray Mallee. This information will be a valuable resource for the management, conservation and restoration of remnant vegetation in semi-arid ecosystems.

Laura Shirley

Laura Shirley

Laura is a PhD student supervised by Pete and Mike Bayly. She is interested in the relationship between species distributions and environmental and geographic gradients. Her research combines an ecological perspective with a biogeographic and historical approach to explain the coexistence of Eucalyptus species in the Grampians Naitional Park, Victoria, Australia. Eucalyptus is an intriguing genus due to its prolific evolutionary radiation and because closely related species frequently coexist in a single habitat type. The project involves combining functional trait, environmental data, with species distribution models. She is also using DNA microsatellite data to reveal speciation modes and cross landscape migration pathways for a clade of closely related species (the Eucalyptus ‘alpina’ clade).

Chrissy Czembor

Chrissy Czembor

Chrissy is a Masters of Science student supervised by Pete, and Brendan Wintle.

Chrissy is investigating stand structure and habitat dynamics in box-ironbark forests using models based on expert knowledge. Her models illustrate how management and natural disturbance can affect the rate and likelihood of stands changing from a degraded state towards something akin to pre-European forests which provide habitat for native fauna. Key foci of the project include investigating the processes of eliciting expert opinion, cost analyses, and issues surrounding uncertainty in model estimates.

Chris Jones

Chris Jones

Chris is Masters of Philosophy student whose project is co-supervised by Pete and David Duncan from the Department of Sustainability and Environment‘s (DSE) Arthur Rylah Institute for Ecological Research (ARIER).

All over the world, management of land occurs with the aim of restoring environmental condition. Management is used by many different bodies such as science institutes, organisations and friends groups to try and undo the effects of a number of activities. Grazing is one such activity known to have negative impacts on vegetation. Two commonly used management tools for grazed areas are fencing and licencing to control or exclude livestock.

In their study, they will examine and compare the results of a previous study (conducted 1994–1995) in north-eastern Victoria which documented the beneficial effects of excluding or limiting stock numbers on a range of vegetation condition indicators. To appropriately assess condition change a sampling design that is both time efficient and of adequate sensitivity to detect change at a site level with a given level of confidence needs to be developed. The project will:

1. Estimate the effects of fencing and licencing as grazing management tools in riparian areas, and compare these to those earlier results.
2. And from these data explore the sensitivities of the survey methods and hence determine appropriate methods of vegetation assessment for monitoring condition change.

Their study is being conducted along the Broken, Boosey and Nine Mile creeks north east of Shepparton (Victoria, Australia).

Rebecca Sagoe-Crentsil

Rebecca Sagoe-Crentsil

Rebecca is doing her Masters of Science under Pete‘s supervision. Her project is to investigate plant functional traits characteristic of riparian vegetation. She is comparing the traits found in a number of riparian species to non-riparian species. The aims of the study are:

1. To survey and characterize species which occur repeatedly in riparian zones, forming a riparian index.
2. To examine the propensity for stem cuttings to strike, through growth room trials.
3. To compile functional trait information from the literature for the surveyed species to determine which traits enable riparian species to survive and proliferate.

Will Morris

Will Morris

Will is a research assistant who works for Pete, Yung and Brendan Wintle on a number of different projects. These, include Bush Returns, the MASSIVE project, riverine restoration project, restoration and invertebrates, and a large scale, multispecies, populations viability study.

His chief interest lies in data and its central role in science. He loves the aspects of data that others might find boring and impulsively seeks out best practice for data collection, management, analysis and presentation.

He did his undergraduate studies here at the University of Melbourne and at Monash University. In his spare time he still works on projects with people at Monash including Jenny Read, Patrick Baker and Murray Logan. Will is also feverishly trying to rid the world of trees, branch by branch!

Warwick McCallum

Warwick McCallum

Warwick is a research assistant in charge of the Bush Returns project and spends much of his time in the field. He co-ordinates a large-scale eucalypt seed production and florescence monitoring program on farms in the Goulburn-Broken Catchment. On the same farms, he also measures seedling survival of plant eucalypts.

He did his undergraduate studies here at the University of Melbourne and completed an honours year, supervised by Andrew Drinnan, in which he studied heteroblasty in eucalypts.

Rhiannon Apted

Rhiannon completed honours in 2005 at La Trobe University where she studied livestock grazing management in western volcanic plains grasslands and differential herbivory by vertebrate (sheep) and invertebrate (slug) on bioassay plantings.

See here for more on the project that Rhiannon was involved in. Her supervisors were John Morgan, La Trobe University and Josh Dorrough, Arthur Rylah Institute (ARI), Victorian Department of Sustainability & Environment (DSE).

Rhiannon worked as a research assistant on the Bush Returns project with Goulburn-Broken Catchment Management Authority.

Alex Thorp

Alex completed honours with Peter in 2006 at Melbourne. She worked on eucalypt seedling growth and survival in gaps in pasture. I think she made it through because she ran every lunchtime. That and sleeping till 4pm at every opportunity.

Alex also worked as research assistant on two projects: seed trapping to estimate the seed rain of woodland eucalypt trees in paddocks, and the invertebrates in revegetation project with Saul Cunningham from CSIRO Entomology.

Anthony Davidson

Anthony was an honours student in 2007. He estimated canopy seed stores of woodland eucalypts in northern Victoria. Anthony is a mad keen cyclist and passionate about conservation and effecting real change in environmental management.

Michael Longmore

For his honours project in 2006, Michael investigated the removal and predation of eucalypt seed by ants in paddocks within grassy woodlands of the Goulburn Broken Catchment.

Rachael Nolan

Racheal completed her Honours research project with Pete and Ralph Mac Nally at Monash in 2004. Rachael researched the condition of the grassy ground layer of Gilgai Plains Grassy Woodlands in the Goulburn-Broken catchment. Rachael also worked with Ralph and Peter for 18 months on the ‘Massive’ project.

Skye Winder

Skye completed her Honours research project with Peter and Ralph Mac Nally at Monash in 2004. Skye investigated the prevalence of natural regeneration in biodiversity replantings in the Lurg Hills, northern Victoria, as part of the Regent Honeyeater Project.