Staff profile

Dr Peter Green

Senior Lecturer

Faculty of Science, Technology and Engineering

School of Life Sciences
Department of Botany

Biological Sciences II Room 472, Melbourne (Bundoora)

 

Qualifications

BSc (Hons), PhD MON.

Membership of professional associations

Ecological Society of Australia, British Ecological Society

Area of study

Botany
Wildlife and Conservation Biology

Brief profile

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.

 

Research interests

Conservation biology

- Please contact me to discuss a topic.

Plant ecology

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Population and community ecology

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Teaching units

CBE2IC - Conservation Biology & Ecology - Issues in Conservation

CBE3AC - Conservation Biology & Ecology - Applications in Conservation

BOT3FEB - Field and Environmental Botany

Recent publications

Green, P.T., Claussen, J & O’Dowd, D.J. (2010). Lost for a century:  rediscovery of the endemic Ridley’s jewel orchid, Zeuxine exilis Ridl. (Orchidaceae), on Christmas Island, Indian Ocean.  Gardens Bulletin Singapore 61: 319-326.

Davis, N.E., O’Dowd, D.J., MacNally, R and Green P.T. (2010). Invasive ants disrupt frugivory by endemic island birds.  Biology Letters 6: 85-88.

O’Dowd, D.J. and Green, P.T. (2010). Invasional meltdown: do invasive ants facilitate secondary invasions?  Pp 271-272 in L. Lach, C. Parr and K. L. Abbott (eds). Ant Ecology. Oxford University Press.

Green, P.T. (2009). Land crabs on Christmas Island.  Pp 532-535 in R.G. Gillespie & D.A. Clague (eds). Encyclopedia of Islands.  University of California Press.

Green, P.T. & O’Dowd, D.J. (2009). Management of invasive invertebrates: lessons from the management of an invasive alien ant.  Pp 153 – 172 in M.N. Clout & P.A. Williams (eds).  Invasive Species Management: A Handbook of Principles and Techniques.  Oxford University Press.

Lindquist, E., Krauss, K., Green, P.T., O’Dowd, D.J., Sherman, P.M. & Smith, T.J. (2009). Land crabs as key drivers in tropical coastal forest recruitment.  Biological Reviews 84: 203-223.

Venn, S.E., Morgan, J.W. and Green, P.T. (2009). Do facilitative interactions with neighboring plants assist the growth of seedlings at high altitudes in alpine Australia? Arctic, Antarctic and Alpine Research 41: 381-387.

Green, P.T., O’Dowd D.J. and Lake, P.S. (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 an alien ant invasion on abundance, behavior, and reproductive success of endemic island birds.  Conservation Biology 22: 1165-1176.

Abbott, K.L. and Green, P.T. (2007). Collapse of an ant-scale mutualism in rainforest on Christmas Island. Oikos, 116: 1238-1246.

Research projects

Indirect Biocontrol of the Yellow Crazy Ant on Christmas Island, Indian Ocean

Long-term vegetation Dynamics at two sites in tropical rainforest in far north Queensland

Investigating the dendrochronological potential of Callitris verrucosa 

Seedling survey at the 25 Ha Supersite (TERN Rainforest Biodiversity Node) in far north Queensland