News and Events

January 2013

Conferences

Yvonne attended the International Biogeography Society (IBS) Conference from 9-13 January in Miami, Florida, and presented a seminar on “Demo-geography: how can spatial population dynamics help us pre-dict species response to global change?”

Yvonne attended the VII Southern Connection Congress from 21-25 January and presented a seminar on “Wilding tree management and research in Australia and spread in New Zealand”

Yi attended the Student Conference on Conservation Science held at the University of Queensland from 21-31 January. She said “it was a wonderful experience to meet people from a variety of research fields. Both talk and poster sessions were impressive involving a wide range of research works of diverse disciplines and backgrounds in the conservation area. The training workshops, given by a group of great scientist in the conservation field, were also popular among the participants.”

Yi next to her poster on “Managing Invaders with Multi-species Interactions” (left) and on the mid-conference field trip to Lamington National Park (right).

Publications

Rob had two papers accepted in Journal of Ecology, one paper concerning IPM methods in Methods in Ecology & Ecology, and a book chapter accepted.

• Caswell H, Salguero-Gómez R. In press. Age, stage, and senescence in plants. Journal of Ecology

• Baudisch A, Salguero-Gómez R, Jones OR,  Wrycza T, Mbeau-Ache C, Franco M, & Colchero F. In press. The pace and shape of senescence in angiosperms. Journal of Ecology
• Metcalf CJE, McMahon S, Salguero-Gómez R, & Jongejans E. 2013. IPMpack: an R package for integral projection models. Methods in Ecology & Evolution 4, 195-200.
• 12. Tielbörger K & Salguero-Gómez R. In press. Some like it hot – are desert plants indifferent to climate change? Progress in Botany, vol 75. Eds Lüttge, Beyschlag & Cushman. Springer, Berlin.

Other news

The Lab welcomes a new Post-doctoral Researcher, Dr. Rob Salguero-Gomez (pictured below). His work explores diverse evolutionary/ecological questions using a wide array of biological disciplines: anatomy, ecophysiology, demography, and comparative biology. Rob is also a visiting scholar of the Max Planck Society (Germany), where he worked as a research fellow previous to his new position at the University of Queensland.

December 2012

Workshops and Conferences

Yvonne attended the ESA Conference in Melbourne (3-7 December) and presented a talk titled “the contributions of cost, management efficacy and demography to efficient management of invasive plants”.

Yvonne attended the Think Tank workshop organised by the NERP Environmental Decisions hub, which is funded by the Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities. The workshops was held to assemble researchers, policy makers and managers to discuss their projects concerning multiple species management and interactions.

Field Trips

Yi spent a whole week on Christmas Island for a workshop in December 2012. The workshop was held to assist three PhD students (including Yi) to get along with their projects and to familiarize them with the ecosystems that they are working on. Read more about her Christmas Island Trip [link].

Yi discussing her project with staff from Christmas Island National Park in a workshop

 

Other news

Congratulations to Alice Yeates for submitting her PhD thesis titled “Gaining more from invasive plant management than just weed control”. Her thesis examines a number of invasive plant management techniques in order to improve predictability of both exotic species establishment in novel ecosystems and community responses to management disturbance, and to direct management actions to better achieve restoration objectives.

Happy holidays!

Lab Christmas Lunch (from left to right) with Natalie Kerr, Jessica Cooke, Yvonne Buckley, Shaun Coutts, and Yi Han.

November 2012

Workshops

Plant Population Dynamics Workshop (Nov 12-16) organised by Yvonne Buckley.

Plant Population Dynamics working group at the University of Queensland (from left to right) Roberto Salguero-Gomez (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research), Johan Ehrlen (Stockholm University), Elizabeth Crone (Harvard Forest), Simon Blomberg (UQ), Yvonne Buckley (UQ), Glenda Wardle (University of Sydney), and Vuong Nguyen (University of Sydney).

Plant Population Dynamics working group on the ferry to Coochiemudlo Island for a mid-workshop break (photo by Rob Salguero-Gomez).

Other news

Buckley Lab had two visiting scholars, Dr. Paul Caplat from Lund University and Dr. Daniel Montoya from the University of Bristol, and a PhD student, Laura Russo from Penn State University.

The Lab welcomes a new Summer Research Scholarship student, Jessica Cooke (pictured below). Jessica has just completed her second year in the Bachelor of Environmental Science (Ecology) Program at the University of Queensland.  Her project concerns examining whether dimorphic seed production strategies in conjunction with seed production numbers achieve more effective dispersal patterns over unimorphic seed production approaches in related species.

Jessica Cooke at Lamington National Park, Queensland for a rainforest ecology course.

October 2012

Publications

Coutts, Shaun, R., Hiroyuki Yokomizo, and Yvonne M. Buckley. In press. The behavior of multiple independent mangers and ecological traits interact to determine prevalence of weeds. Ecological Applications. (link)

Conferences

Shaun Coutts attended the 28th Annual Meeting of the Society of Population Ecology at Toho University, Chiba in Japan. He gave a talk titled ‘Weed control in the real world: Why we can’t ignore the neighbours’ relating to his recent publication above.

Natalie Kerr attended the 18th Australasian Weeds  Conference in Melbourne. She presented a poster titled ‘How can we manage Scotch Broom cost-efficiently with limited information’, which was a subsection of her honours project. She submitted a summary of her poster to the conference proceedings, which can be viewed here.

Other news

A new PhD student, Fleur Maseyk, has started her PhD supervised by Yvonne Buckley (Primary supervisor, UQ), Hugh Possingham (UQ), Alec MacKay (AgResearch) and Marit Kragt (UWA). For more information about Fleur and her PhD project, view her profile here.