News
12 Nov 2018: Congratulations Carla on defending your PhD! Thanks very much to Pita Verweij (overseas examiner) and Neville Crossman (oral examiner) for your valuable input, and well done Carla for such an excellent performance!
1 Nov 2018: Jason has just been made a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. See the news release here.
13 Oct 2018: Our new paper, led by Dominique Gravel, just came out in Ecography. It presents a quantitative framework for the turnover of network interactions in space and time. Check it out here!
4 Oct 2018: Congratulations Jono on receiving a highly prestigious Rutherford Discovery Fellowship! This is one of ten 5-year fellowships awarded each year to the top ten early-career researchers nationally.
1 Oct 2018: Farewell Johanna! Today she begins a new position at Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research.
3 Sep 2018: Welcome Jono Tonkin to the group! Learn more about what Jono does here.
31 Aug 2018: Congratulations Carla on submitting your PhD thesis!
18 Aug 2018: Johanna's latest paper has just come out - check it out here!
4 May 2018: Congratulations Sophie on submitting your masters thesis!
4 April 2018: Our new paper has just come online early at Ecology Letters (see it here). It shows that species that have few degrees of separation (i.e. short path lengths) from others are better able to attract interaction partners during community assembly, and also more likely to retain them during disassembly. These symmetrical assembly and disassembly processes are capable of producing important network structures such as nestedness. Our finding that short path lengths to all other species was more important than the number of direct interaction partners suggests that indirect effects may be important for network assembly and disassembly processes.
27 March 2018: Congratulations Melissa on successfully defending your PhD!
20 Feb 2018: We're very pleased to welcome Laís to the country and the group as she begins her PhD research.
4 Nov 2017: Our new paper, led by Isabel Donoso (who visited our group for several months) is out now at Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution (read it here). It shows that interactions among birds and fruits are primarily neutral (determined by species abundances) and influenced by the ecological neighbourhood.
7 Oct. 2017: Our new paper, led by Phillip Staniczenko, is now online at Nature Communications (read it here). It presents an approach for predicting changes to quantitative networks, and explores the amount of additional data required to improve these predictions.
25 Sep. 2017: Welcome to the group Mark! We look forward to working with you as you complete your PhD here in New Zealand.
25 Aug. 2017: We have a three-year funded PhD position in our research group in NZ to work within a larger project on co-evolution in host-parasitoid networks. Further details on the Vacancies page. The closing date for applications is 29 September 2017.
19 July 2017: Congratulations Zane on the submission of your masters thesis!
14 July 2017: Our letter has just been published in Science. It highlights the discrepancy between conservation ideology, which frequently argues for increased engagement with indigenous peoples, and conservation legislation, which frequently limits their engagement with their land. Read the article here. This is part of our work within the New Zealand's Biological Heritage National Science Challenge.
6 July 2017: Our review on Ecological networks along environmental gradients is now online early at Annual Reviews. Read it here.
3 July 2017: Melissa's new paper has just come out at PLoS One. It compares carrot varieties with different seed set and tests which mechanisms generate those differences. It also tests how pollination and the differences among varieties may change with changing temperature. Read it here.
28 June 2017: We have recently prepared a policy brief, led by Johanna, outlining the key themes for our National Science Challenge project on tipping points in social-ecological systems. See it here.
12 May 2017: A couple of articles have highlighted our recent PNAS paper on evolution of host resistance to parasitoid attack. See the one in Science and another in PNAS.
14 March 2017: Our new paper has just come out at PNAS (read it here). It shows heritable resistance of a pest weevil to its parasitoid biological control agent.
Congratulations to former lab member Etienne Laliberté, who was recently awarded the very prestigious Tansley medal. Well done Etienne!
PHD position available, working on spatial dispersal networks in a multidisciplinary project. Details here. Closing date 28 Feb 2017 (Now closed)
20 Dec 2016: Welcome to Hsi-Cheng, who recently began a PhD in our group!
9 Dec 2016: Welcome to Paula, who recently began a 2.5 year postdoc in our group!
9 Dec 2016: Our new paper with Tom Bell just came out at Proceedings B (read it here). It outlines a set of hypotheses regarding the impacts of landscape processes and agricultural intensification on microbial communities and functioning.
16 Nov 2016: Lupe's new paper is now online early at Ecology (read it here). In earlier work we found that food-web structure can differ systematically across habitats, but this raises the question of how food webs merge at the interface of two habitats. This paper uses empirical parasitoid-host networks from native and plantation forest edges to show that the edge web is not a mere blending of the webs from the two adjacent habitats. Rather, increases in generalist parasitoids at edges generated more highly-connected networks.
14 Oct 2016: Sophie has officially begun her masters in our group - welcome aboard Sophie!
4 Oct 2016: Welcome to our two new postdocs, Johanna and Warwick!
31 August 2016: Our new paper led by Carol Frost has just come out in Nature Communications (read it here). It shows that attack rates on hosts, and their consequent changes in population size, can be predicted by their sharing of natural enemies (parasitoids) with other hosts in the food web. Moreover, it shows that this apparent competition occurs across different habitats, such that the entire landscape functions as a single meta-network.
12 August 2016: A new paper led by Adriana De Palma and Andy Purvis from Imperial has just come out in Scientific Reports (read it here). It shows that the impact of land use on pollinator diversity changes across regions.
9 August 2016: Our new paper led by Rudolf Rohr has just come online early at American Naturalist. It looks at the three-way relationship between species evenness, productivity and species persistence. Link to the journal page here.
5 August 2016: Congratulations Camille on an excellent thesis defense!! Many thanks also to K.C. Burns and Pedro Jordano for examining the thesis.
2 July 2016: Our new paper led by Carine Emer has recently come online at Diversity and Distributions. It shows that the role of exotic species in pollination networks can be predicted by their role in their native range. Check it out here.
12 May 2016: TWO POSTDOCTORAL POSITIONS CURRENTLY ADVERTISED IN OUR GROUP: Please check our vacancies page. Sorry, this position is now closed.
12 May 2016: Camille's new paper has just come online early at Ecology Letters. It shows that species roles in pollination networks relate to their contribution to functional diversity.
5 Apr 2016: In case you're interested in trait matching or predicting network structure, this paper led by Nacho Bartomeus just came online at Functional Ecology.
9 Mar 2016: Jason is currently visiting the entomology department at Cornell.
30 Jan 2016: Matt Jones has just arrived on a Fulbright Fellowship - welcome Matt!
27 Jan 2016: Marilia is heading back to Brasil - we'll all miss you and we really enjoyed your visit!
11 Jan 2016: Farewell Karen, we'll all miss you and wish you all the best at Cornell!
1 Dec 2015: Jason's keynote talk at the Ecological Society of Australia conference made the news for all the wrong reasons... one story, another story
5 Nov 2015: Postdoc position going at the Bioprotection centre at Lincoln University. The project is led by Ian Dickie, and myself and others are collaborating. It will involve generating and working with below ground plant-microbe networks. http://bioprotection.org.nz/vacancies/postdoctoral-fellow-plant-soil-interaction-networks
27 March 2015: Congratulations Michelle on submitting your MSc thesis!
16 Jan 2015: Welcome Marilia! She is visiting our and Daniel Stouffer's group for a year.
9 Dec 2014: Congratulations Christie on submitting your MSc thesis!!
18 Nov 2014: Jason receives the 'Te Tohu Taiao' award for excellence in ecology from the New Zealand Ecological Society.
28 Oct 2014: Lupe's new paper in Journal of Animal Ecology is now online early. It shows how phylogenetic diversity across trophic levels and consumer-resource phylogenetic matching change across a habitat edge from native to plantation forest. Check it out here.
22 Jul 2014: Carol's new Ecology paper has just come online early. It uses a large-scale field experiment to show that cross-habitat spillover of predators depends on habitat productivity, and is stronger in generalist than specialist predators - check it out here.
17 Jul 2014: Lupe's new Ecology paper has just come out. It links food-web structure to ecosystem functioning and stability via network-wide measures of complementarity and redundancy. Read it here.
28 May 2014: Welcome Melissa and Carla to the group!
23 May 2014: New paper by Rader et al. is now online early at Diversity and Distributions.
19 May 2014: Welcome Carla to the group! Carla has just arrived to begin her PhD in the group.
10 Jan 2014: Congratulations Carol on an excellent PhD defense! Many thanks to Jacqueline Beggs and Kevin McCann for acting as examiners!
15 Nov 2013: Very well done Liz, for defending your thesis like a pro! Thanks also to Bruce Burns for doing the oral exam via video conference.
24 Oct 2013: Congratulations Lupe on an excellent performance during your PhD oral exam!!! Thanks also to Sarina MacFadyen for coming to be the examiner, and Ulrich Brose for examining the thesis!
20 Jun 2013: Congratulations Simon on your MSc submission!!
24 May 2013: Read response to recent Perspectives paper and my reply here
5 Mar 2013: Ceci's new paper just came out in PLoS One - read it here
1 Mar 2013: Check out the interview on BBC news about pollinator decline
19 Feb 2013: Welcome to our new homepage!