Vesk Lab Research

Current Research

Past Research

The MASSIVE project: projecting biodiversity outcomes of broad-scale revegetation.

Problems with soil and water and declines in native biodiversity have been linked to clearance of native vegetation. Large amounts of effort and dollars are being directed to revegetation works in the agricultural landscapes of southeast and southwest Australia, but we know relatively little about what benefits these efforts bring, particularly for biodiversity. An ongoing ARC Linkage project with Ralph Mac Nally and Jim Thomson from Monash and Andrew Bennett from Deakin University, Josh Dorrough from DSE and Goulburn-Broken, North-Central, North East and Wimmera-Mallee CMAs is seeking to project and optimize the future biodiversity benefits of broad-scale revegetation initiatives.

Revegetation

We consider future landscapes with substantially more native vegetation than at present to deal with these natural resource problems. Plantings will be slow to mature so optimal planning for landscape revegetation must consider how long it will take for the new vegetation to provide suitable habitat, both at patch and landscape scales. We are studying vegetation development in old planted sites (some of them >100 years old!) to develop empirical models of habitat for birds through time and across the Box-Ironbark forests and Grassy Woodlands of northern Victoria. These are integrated with meso-scale distribution models for birds to develop an optimization framework to aid designs for placement and scheduling of replantings to give the best outcomes for biodiversity management given constraints on amounts of retired area and costs of implementation. This will enable managers to better allocate revegetation efforts across the landscape.

See Vesk & Mac Nally (2006) for Peter and Ralph's take on the problem, and the Landscape Futures Alliance (LFA) webpage for activities associated with the LFA.

The Bush Returns project: natural regeneration of woodland eucalypts in pastures—getting trees on farms the easy way?

Natural regeneration of woodland eucalypts

Natural regeneration could potentially be a cost-effective and efficient contributor or replacement for active revegetation strategies such as tubestock planting and direct seeding (Cluff & Semple 1994; Dorrough & Moxham 2005). However, its practicability is limited by our current lack of understanding of how climate variability and site and management factors influence seed availability, germination and survival and growth of regenerating plants (Vesk & Dorrough 2006). Strategic investment in natural regeneration will be greatly assisted through a research program that incorporates targeted experimental research and long-term monitoring of a number of spatially dispersed sites incorporated into a program of active adaptive management. Goulburn Broken Catchment Management Authority have initiated a trial landholder incentive scheme to achieve large-scale regeneration of native vegetation on private land—Bush Returns

Transplanted eucalypts

In this project, further understanding of the process of natural regeneration will be obtained through:

1. Monitoring of sites selected in the Bush Returns process.
2. Experiments to determine both how the likelihood of natural regeneration can be manipulated and assess the effectiveness of various management actions such as strategic grazing, fire and herbicide use.

Josh and I have been working on a rule-based model to ask questions about regeneration likelihood and importance of different drivers.

Restoring riverine ecosystems: effective model-based planning and monitoring

There is considerable uncertainty about the best way to restore Australia’s degraded riverine ecosystems because we lack the information and framework to predict ecological responses to alternative management interventions. Developing the tools to make such predictions is the aim of an exciting new collaboration with the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE), the Murray Darling Basin Commission (MDBC), New Zealand National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (MDBC) and University of Otago, following successful Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project funding. This work is to investigate the ecological responses to riverine and riparian restoration projects. To carry out effective restoration, we need to know about the possible alternative pathways that restored sites may follow in the future and we need to be able to detect changes. This work will involve developing, testing and improving conceptual models of restoration processes, and using these models to develop planning and monitoring protocols within bio-economic frameworks. This will allow evaluation of actions in relation to costs and benefits from both ecological and economic perspectives.

Collaborators

• Simon Nicol & David Forsyth, Arthur Rylah Institute (ARI)/DSE
• Jane Elith & Mark Burgman, University of Melbourne
• Dave Choquenot, Landcare Research
• Richard Barker, University of Otago

Restoration of ecological communities: the interplay of vegetation and invertebrates

How do insect and plant communities develop through time? Vegetation and invertebrates are the dominant players in terrestrial ecosystems and their interaction may have a large influence on the rate and pathways of ecosystem development. Invertebrate herbivores can affect performance of plants and may do so differentially between plant species. Conversely, plants provide food and habitat resources for invertebrates and plant species may differ in the quality of habitat they provide.

A collaborative research project between myself and Saul Cunningham, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) Entomology, is asking questions about how invertebrate and plant communities interact to determine the rate and pathways of ecosystem reassembly following revegetation activities.

A malaise trap

We will make use of currently-studied revegetation sites of differing age and planting species to collect data on vegetation structure and invertebrates. This will clarify the role of vegetation as habitat for invertebrates, contribute to a better understanding of the benefits of revegetation, and assist sensitive and robust sampling designs for future studies of interactions between vegetation and invertebrates. Specific questions to be answered in these early stages of our collaboration are:

1. Do sites with greater diversity of foliage heights support richer invertebrate faunal assemblages?
2. Is total biomass of flying insects correlated with revegetation structural characteristics?

Projecting the effects of the Box-Ironbark Thinning Trial

How to restore forests on lands subjected to intense mining, forestry and agricultural disturbance? Since European settlement, the Box-Ironbark forests and woodlands of north and central Victoria have been extensively cleared for agriculture, gold mining, urban development and timber. Today only 17% of the original Box-Ironbark vegetation remains. With the declaration of the new Box-Ironbark parks in October 2002, Parks Victoria has responsibility for the development and implementation of an Ecological Management Strategy (EMS) to restore this modified ecosystem to a condition more closely allied with pre-European forests in the new reserve network.

Qualitative historic records suggest that Box-Ironbark forests and woodlands consisted predominantly of large, mature and widely spaced trees, patches of younger trees, a wide array of understorey shrubs and herbs, and a forest floor of fallen branches and trees. Currently much of the forests are characterized by dense stands of even-aged small stems, often of coppice origin, with little mid- or under-storey and regeneration. These forests provide little high quality habitat for vertebrate fauna.

Ecological thinning is the first management technique to be trialled under the EMS. The broad objective of the research in Box-Ironbark Ecological Thinning Trial is to develop a thinning technique suitable for maintaining and improving forest structure, diversity and ecological function in Box-Ironbark forests.

As many of the effects of thinning are unlikely to manifest for decades to centuries, modelling is needed to project possible outcomes of the trials. A collaboration between UM Botany and Parks Victoria researchers aims to form the basis of capacity to project fauna species responses to changed forest structure because of ecological thinning activities. Broad aims of the research are:

1. To develop a change model that projects vegetation structure through time.
2. To review and examine vegetation structure-function relationships and predict what resources are available at different times.
3. To develop a species response model that uses foraging and breeding associations with resources to predict habitat suitability for bird and mammal species through time.
4. To review and examine uncertainties in the above models.

Even if we can’t make precise projections, we will make explicit our understanding of the system function and this can inform decisions about future management of these degraded forests and woodlands.

See this poster for a description of the trial. More Box-Ironbark info can be found on the Parks Victoria website as well as more information on the trial.

Near death experiences of plants

How do plants resprout after damage? Why don't all plants do it? What does it cost a plant to be able to resprout? What other traits might be related to resprouting ability? Looking for collaborators!

Plant traits in the city

Plant traits and urbanization—a working group led by Nick Williams from the Australian Centre for Urban Ecology (ARCUE) and supported by the ARC-NZ Research Network for Vegetation Function.

Plant traits with Club Mac

My PhD was with Mark Westoby at Macquarie University, where I worked on plant functional types, grazing and fire in the rangelands. I used published literature to analyse how consistent were species reponses to grazing and how well they might be predicted form measurable plant traits. I also worked on reprouting by plants, how variable it was within and between species and across different distrubances, using field and glasshouse experiments, and meta-analyses. During my time in the lab I had a great time with cluey and fun people, learnt a lot, saw some cool places and contributed to a major review on plant traits.

Body fluid exchange in mycorrhizhae

I worked on apoplastic barriers to solute uptake in young mycorrhizal roots of Eucalyptus pilularis with Bill Allaway (University of Sydney) and Anne Ashford (University of New South Wales). This involved growing mycorrhizhal seedlings and doing experiments with water soluble tracers for fluorescence and electron microscopy.

You are what you bathe in

Elemental uptake and biomonitoring in freshwater organisms. My MSc research at The University of Sydney was on metal uptake by an aquatic plant from a wetland receiving urban runoff. I investigated spatial variation in metal concentrations within a wetland, and where metals got to within the plant. I also worked with Maria Byrne on freshwater mussels and biomonitoring. We studied calcium phosphate granules in the tissue of Hyridella depressa to learn about the chemistry of the water they lived in and thus the water catchment condition.

Getting rid of stuff to see good stuff

I spent several years working with electron microsopes at The University of Sydney Electron Microscopy (EM) Unit. Much of this work was aimed at better specimen preparation methods for plant cell ultrastructural studies using high resolution scanning electron microscopy (HRSEM)