Blog Posts

Another PhD completion! Congratulations to Kate Parkins!

24/4/2018

Kate presented her PhD completion seminar last week and is a (possum) whisker away from submitting her thesis. Her research focussed on edges, which are ecologically important environmental features that have been well researched in agricultural and urban landscapes but remain poorly understood in natural systems.

Fire is an agent of edge creation and a globally important driver of biome distribution and community composition, yet little is known about how fire edges affect ecological processes in flammable ecosystems. While edge effects and faunal-fire responses have been well studied independently, how animals respond to fire edges remains poorly understood.

Kate's thesis explores this knowledge gap focusing on the influence of fire edges on fauna, and discusses some methodological advances for ecological field studies. Her study sites were in Victoria's beautiful Central Highlands where she invested enormous energy installing remote cameras, trapping bush rats and agile antechinus, and fitting pesky-but-cute mountain brushtail possums with GPS collars. The possums in particular played very hard to get, but Kate's persistence paid off and she's currently putting the finishing touches on her analyses.

Congratulations Kate on your epic achievement!

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Congratulations to Manuela Fischer on her PhD completion!

8/4/2018

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Manuela gave her completion seminar on Friday and is moments away from submitting her thesis. Her exciting project involved use of GPS data and experimental exclosures to investigate resource selection, road crossing behaviour and browsing impact of the abundant native swamp wallaby. Her study took place on Phillip Island, a landscape of natural and human-modified patches, dissected by roads.

She found that wallabies modulate their selection of resources on a circadian basis to optimise the use of resources under anthropogenic disturbance. Although natural vegetation patches are likely to be used, patches of high anthropogenic disturbances are tolerated at night, when disturbances are less. She also showed that roads are avoided, especially during the day and that crossings are more likely when tree cover is high and water further away from the crossing location. Further, she demonstrated that in vegetation patches, wallabies suppress weed diversity, but do not influence native species diversity.

Her work has shed substantial light on the behaviour of Phillip Island's booming wallaby population. Well done Manuela on your inspiring work!

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News from the front

8/3/2018

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(The fieldwork front)

A team of reptile trappers and vegetation measurers has made Casterton its second home over the past couple of months.

This work forms part of Annalie and Sarah's PhD projects, and Kelvin's Masters project. Their missions are fairly ambitious and they've been assisted by Zahlia, Holly, Julian and Matt, as well as a crew of fantastic volunteers.

Please enjoy a selection of their favourite photos, and don't hesitate to get in touch via facebook if you're interested in helping.

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A holy grail for ecological fire management and research: What aspects of the fire regime make plants and animals tick?

25/2/2018

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Is that a ghostly presence on the right-hand-side or a tree stump?

Growth-stage optimisation determines the proportions of vegetation growth stages (categorical representations of time since fire) that maximise species diversity, providing an operational goal for fire managers. To date, optimisation has only been applied to growth stages in a fire management context but other aspects of fire regimes, such as severity, are also likely to influence species diversity.

In our new paper, we ask:
1 How do growth stage and fire severity influence plant and vertebrate species’ occurrence?
2 What mix of growth stages and fire severities maximises the diversity of these groups?

We surveyed birds, mammals and plants in the tall wet forest of Victoria’s Central Highlands, and found that growth stage predicted the occurrence of many species. Severity of the most recent fire was important over and above growth stage for a small subset of species; however, low-severity fire was a more important driver of species diversity than any other growth stage or severity category.

Growth stage is a good surrogate for developing conservation targets in tall wet forests, but does not capture the full range of species’ fire responses. More complex versions of growth stage optimisation that accommodate multiple fire-regime variables need to be explored to yield ecologically meaningful conservation goals.

Swan, M., Sitters, H., Cawson, J., Duff, T., Wibisono, Y. & York, A. (2018). Fire planning for multispecies conservation: Integrating growth stage and fire severity. Forest Ecology and Management 415-416: 85-97

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Join us for Bushfire & Biodiversity 2018!

22/1/2018

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Our graduate subject runs as a two-week intensive from Monday 9 - Friday 20 April at the Parkville Campus. It combines lectures, computer labs and a field trip to the beautiful Otway Ranges (including an occasional snap tournament, if you're lucky).

The course covers the effects of fire on aspects of biodiversity and ecological processes. Managers are committed to developing science-based ecological burning strategies which achieve both biodiversity and asset protection objectives. Increased knowledge of the ecological impacts of fire on plants and animals facilitates a better understanding of how more effective management can be achieved.

More information on Bushfire & Biodiversity and other fire-related graduate subjects is available here. The Handbook provides additional details.

Please contact us if you have any questions about the course.

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Manuela's wallaby work in the news

12/1/2018

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Manuela is currently wrapping up her PhD thesis and has discussed some of her findings with Westernport Water.

“The key to a peaceful coexistence with our wallaby friends on Phillip Island is education and compassion, especially as they find their natural environment and habitat gradually shrinking, and their interaction with humans increasing."

Click the image below for the full story!

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Four thesis completions and a conference prize!

18/12/2017

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Hearty congratulations to Andrew, Lauren, Sarah and Zahlia on the completion of their research projects.

Zahlia's project examined responses of mammal functional diversity to vegetation structure, fire history and landscape context, and Lauren's explored the responses of individual mammal species to spatial pattern across a gradient of scales. Their theses are the first to arise from the Fire & Fragmentation Project, so their work involved delving into relatively uncharted waters. They spent a fair chunk of time chasing elusive remnant patches of vegetation, and were among the first of us to discover some of western Victoria's less accommodating roads. The long days (weeks) they spent staring at wildlife camera images and consulting experts will be enormously helpful to the camera trappers of the future. We owe them (at least) one!

We also congratulate Andrew Stephens and Sarah on completion of their Masters theses.  Sarah undertook an epic fieldwork campaign involving measurement of three-dimensional vegetation structure and collection of fuel hazard information at Otways sites. Her thesis is accompanied by a new paper in Forests comparing visual assessment of surface fuel loads with destructively sampled surface fuels.

Andrew used a vascular plant dataset collected in the Otways under the Fire, Landscape Pattern & Biodiversity Project to examine the responses of fire persistence traits to productivity and fire gradients.

Andrew, Lauren, Sarah and Zahlia have successfully wrangled their research questions, data and writing within relatively short periods of time, and we hope they have particularly laid back festive seasons! Please find their thesis titles here, and get in touch for more information about their work.

The thesis-submission season overlapped the conference (and fieldwork) season to make for an action-packed spring.

Holly visited Queenstown, NZ for the SEEM (statistics in ecology and environmental monitoring) conference, and Alan, Annalie, Kate, Sandra and Sarah attended the recent joint conference of the Ecological Society of Australia and the New Zealand Ecological Society in the Hunter Valley.

Kate won an award for the presentation she gave on her mountain brushtail possum tracking research.

Well done Kate on this fantastic achievement!

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Reptile-trapping gets off to a cracking start

16/11/2017

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Annalie, Sarah, Holly, Julian and Matt caught more animals than in their wildest dreams during their inaugural reptile-trapping trip last week.

They used six funnel traps and six pitfall traps at each of 10 sites in the Drajurk and Roseneath State Forests near Casterton in western Victoria. They were treated to visits from the Eastern three-lined Skink (Bassiana duperreye - a particularly trap-happy species), South-eastern Slider (Lerista bougainvillii), Jacky Dragon (Amphibolurus muricatus), Striped Worm-lizard (Aprasia striolata), Common Garden Skink (Lampropholis guitchenoti), Southern Grass Skink (Pseudemoia entrecasteauxii), and Obscure Skink (Morethia obscura).

The work forms part of Annalie and Sarah's PhD projects. Annalie is examining the responses of reptile communities to spatial pattern in fire history, and is also interested in comparing the efficacy of trapping methods. Sarah is exploring the combined effects of fire and fragmentation on species' movement capacities with a view to finding out how managers can apply fire to enhance species' connectivity and persistence.

Between trap checks we found time to admire the swathes of Xanthorrhoea australis, which is flowering spectacularly. Kelvin plans to measure the shape and distribution of X. australis as part of his studies of small mammal habitat associations, so we also spent a while pondering alternative methods.

Many months of trapping lie ahead (10 sites down, 130 to go), but it was a promising start.

Please visit the Fire & Fragmentation Project page for more information about this research.

Non-reptilian highlights included a Silky Mouse (Pseudomys apodemoides)

Before heading home we deployed six camera traps at each site.

Eastern Shinglebacks (Tiliqua rugosa), aka Sleepy Lizards, were hanging out everywhere except the traps.

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Volunteer opportunity: microbats and fire in the Otway Ranges

9/10/2017

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Sandra is looking for volunteers to join her on short field trips between now and Christmas. She'll be working with bat detectors and invertebrate traps at various sites in the beautiful Otway Ranges.

A reasonable level of fitness is required for walking short distances through the bush to sites without established walking tracks.

All food, accommodation, coffee etc. will be provided. Upcoming dates are:

October
Sun 15 – Mon 16

November
Sun 5 – Mon 6
Sat 11 – Sun 12

December
Sun 3 – Mon 4
Sun 10 – Mon 11
Sun 17

If you’d like to join in or find out more, please contact Sandra.

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Two PhD opportunities now available

22/8/2017

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Following discussions with ecologists and land managers in Adelaide last week, we are now offering two exciting PhD projects. Successful applicants will study the effects of fire and fragmentation on biodiversity in eucalypt woodlands:

Project 1
The stringybark woodlands of western Victoria and eastern South Australia are typical of much of southeast Australia in that they are highly flammable and have been extensively cleared. This project involves collecting data on mammals or invertebrates to determine the influence of fire and fragmentation on species diversity and movement.

Project 2
The Mount Lofty Ranges of South Australia is recognised as one of Australia’s Biodiversity Hotspots and is home to threatened species like the Southern Brown Bandicoot and Mount Lofty Ranges Chestnut-rumped Heathwren. The aim of this project is to understand the influence of fire and fragmentation on key fauna species.

The projects will run from 2018 to 2021 and are based at the Creswick campus near Ballarat, Victoria. Both projects require collection of field data in the regions of Casterton (Project 1) or Adelaide (Project 2).

Further details, and information on how to apply, can be found here: