How resilient are forests to fragmentation? How can we manage networks of fragmented forest patches to increase their resilience? These are critical ecological questions as almost all forests in temperate and tropical systems have undergone fragmentation or are undergoing fragmentation currently.
Wallacea has a unique fauna and flora characterised by incredibly high levels of biodiversity and endemism, and which is threatened by changing land use, exploitation and climate change.
Increasing use is made of marine protected areas (MPAs) to locally manage and conserve marine biodiversity. Although highly mobile, with complex temporal and spatial movement patterns, many endangered elasmobranchs show site association to critical habitats at important life history stages.
We have demonstrated repeatable and substantial differences in the colonisation of rice cultivars by the model arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungus Rizophagus irregularis and mapped quantitative trait loci for the variation.
This project aims at developing new spatially- and genetically-explicit theory to understand (1) evolution of inbreeding mating systems and associated sociality, and (2) its consequences for species adaptation to changing environments and evolutionary potential.
