Staff profile

Qualifications

Pete Green completed his BSc (Hons) at Monash University in 1986. He then spent many years studying the ecology of tropical rainforests, first as a postgraduate student on Christmas Island (PhD Monash University 1993), then as a Postdoctoral/Research Fellow in northern Queensland (Australian National University), and then again on Christmas Island (Monash University). He was appointed as Lecturer in Botany at La Trobe University in 2004.

Teaching areas

• CBE2IC - Conservation biology
• BOT2AES - Australian ecology and systematics
• BOT3FEB - Field and environmental botany
• BOT3ESE - Ecology, systematics and evolution

Research interests

I am an ecologist with a broad range of interests, including forest ecology, plant-animal interactions, seed and seedling ecology, invasion biology, and the ecological strategies of plants.
• Biotic Filters to Community Assembly
  One of the main goals of community ecology is to understand the processes that distil a local community from a regional pool of species. These processes can be thought of as ecological filters that admit to a local community only those species that can persist under local conditions. These filters can be both abiotic (climate, soils etc) and biotic (predators, pathogens, competitors etc). Together with colleagues from Monash University, I study red land crabs, invasive yellow crazy ants and scale insects as biotic filters to the local assembly of rainforest seedling communities on Christmas Island (Indian Ocean).
• Trait-Based Determinants of Community Assembly
  Species are filtered from the regional pool according to their key functional traits, and differences in filter number, type, and strength lead to variation in local community composition. Species sharing the same or similar key functional traits are regarded as sharing the same ecological ‘strategy’. The study of plant ecological strategies is useful because it sheds light on the selective forces that have shaped the evolution of plants, and because grouping plants by their strategies provides researchers and managers with a tractable means of predicting vegetation responses to global change. Together with John Morgan, I am assessing the UK-based triangular C-S-R Plant Strategy Scheme for its utility in an Australian context near Falls Creek, on the Bogong High Plains.
  
• Maintenance of Species Diversity
  In any community, there are a few common species and many rare ones, and one general idea is that rare species ‘avoid’ going locally extinct by performing better (higher rates of recruitment, lower rates of mortality etc) than more common species. I collaborate with Kyle Harms (Louisiana State University) and Joseph H. Connell (University of California Santa Barbara) on a decades-old field project to test some of these ideas. We work at two forest sites in Queensland, one in tropical rainforest near Cairns, and another in sub-tropical rainforest in Lamington National Park, near Brisbane.

Recent publications and presentations

• Green, P.T., O'Dowd DJ and P.S. Lake (2008). Recruitment dynamics in a rainforest seedling community: context-independent impact of a keystone consumer. Oecologia 156:373-385
• Davis, N.E., O'Dowd, D.J., Green, P.T. and Mac Nally, R. (2008). Effects of alien ant invasion on endemic island birds. Conservation Biology, in press.
• Abbott, K.L. and Green, P.T. (2007). Collapse of an ant-scale mutualism in rainforest on Christmas Island. Oikos, 116, 1238-1246.
• Connell, J.H., Green, P.T., Debski, I., Gehring, C.A., Goldwasser, L., Harms, K.E., Juniper, P.A. & Theimer, T.C. 2004. Dynamics of seedling recruitment in an Australian Tropical rainforest. In E. Bermingham, C. Dick & C. Moritz (eds.). Tropical Rainforests: Past, Present and Future. University of Chicago Press, Ill.
• Green, P.T. & Juniper, P.A. 2004. Seed mass, seedling herbivory and the reserve effect in tropical rain forest seedlings. Functional Ecology 18:539-547.
• Green, P.T. & Juniper, P.A. 2004. Seed-seedling allometry in tropical rainforest trees: seed mass-related patterns of resource allocation and the ‘reserve effect’. Journal of Ecology 92:397-408
• Green, P.T., Lake, P.S. & O'Dowd, D.J. 2004. Resistance of island rainforest to invasion by alien plants: influence of microhabitat and herbivory on seedling performance. Biological Invasions 6:1-9.
• Green, P.T. 2004. Burrow dynamics of the red land crab Gecarcoidea natalis (Brachyura, Gecarcinidae) in rain forest on Christmas Island (Indian Ocean). Journal of Crustacean Biology 24:340-349.
• Green, P.T. 2004. Field observations of moulting and moult increment in the red land crab, Gecarcoidea natalis (Brachyura, Gecarcinidae), on Christmas Island (Indian Ocean). Crustaceana 77:125-128.
• O'Dowd, D.J., Green, P.T. and Lake, P.S. 2003. Invasional ‘meltdown’ on an oceanic island. Ecology Letters 6: 812-817.
• Connell, J.H. and Green, P.T. 2000. Seedling dynamics over thirty-two years in a tropical rain forest tree. Ecology 81:568-584.
• Green, P.T. 1999. Seed germination in Chrysophyllum sp. nov., a large-seeded rainforest species in north Queensland: effects of seed size, litter depth and seed position. Australian Journal of Ecology 24:608-613.
• Green, P.T. 1999. Greta’s Garbo: stranded seeds and fruits from Greta Beach, Christmas Island, Indian Ocean. Journal of Biogeography 26:937-946
• Green, P.T., Lake, P.S., & O'Dowd, D.J. 1999. Monopolization of litter processing by a dominant land crab on a tropical oceanic island. Oecologia 119:435-444.
• Green, P.T., Hart, R., Jamil bin Jantan, Metcalfe, D.J., O'Dowd, D.J. & Lake, P.S. 1999. Red crabs in rain forest on Christmas Island, Indian Ocean: no effect on the soil seed bank. Australian Journal of Ecology 24:90-94.
• Green, P.T. 1998. Litterfall in rain forest on Christmas Island, Indian Ocean: quantity, seasonality and composition. Biotropica 30:671-676.
• Green, P.T. 1997. Red crabs in rain forest on Christmas Island, Indian Ocean: activity patterns, density and biomass. Journal of Tropical Ecology 13:17-38.
• Green, P.T., O'Dowd, D.J. and Lake, P.S. 1997. Control of seedling recruitment by land crabs in rain forest on a remote oceanic island. Ecology 78:2474-2486
• Green, P.T. 1996. Canopy gaps in rain forest on Christmas Island, Indian Ocean: size distribution and methods of measurement. Journal of Tropical Ecology 12:427-434.
• Yorkston, H. D. & Green, P.T. 1997. The breeding distribution and status of Abbott's booby (Sulidae: Papasula abbotti) on Christmas Island, Indian Ocean. Biological Conservation 79:293-301.