Nov 2020: Two of my honours students presented their work at the Australian Mammal Society Conference this month. Felicity Charles presented preliminary results on whether or not wildlife use under-road culverts. Kellie Schuring presented some preliminary results on lead poisoning of kangaroos and their habitats on a shooting range. Although the conference was online, we attended at Hidden Vale wildlife sanctuary with other delegates, which almost made it feel like a real, pre-covid conference.

The leopard hat and Felicity and Kellie's jungle outfits were part of the 'ecology' theme of the conference!

Feb 2020: OK, the title might be a biiiiit of an exaggeration... But what I'm trying to say is that some plant species become globally invasive because multiple introductions mix their genetic stock, making them highly adaptable. This means they're no longer beholden to environmental constraints that existed in their native range.

This is what me and a team of 48 scientists found when we set out to test some ecological theories about how plants adapt to new environments, focussing on changes in demography and dispersal.

PLANTPOPNET, established in 2015 by Prof. Yvonne Buckley and an international steering committe, provided the gobal network to undertake such an ambitious quest, using Plantago lanceolata as a model species.

We were a bit shocked to find that some of the ‘rules of ecology’ simply didn't apply to this species. For example - Plantago lanceolata had no regard for the pesky ecological prediction that genetic diversity will increase with population size and fecundity. And, while the species was strongly associated with environmental gradients in it's native Europe, outside of that range, it didn't matter what kind of environment they were living in, Plantago almost always had high genetic diversity and high adaptability. 

For more information, check out the paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

And see the media reports here and here.

Oct 2019: After three action-packed years in Ireland, I've arrived back in Australia to start a new position as Lecturer in Wildlife Management in the School of Agriculture and Food Science (SAFS) at University of Queensland's Gatton Campus. I was welcomed to a region ravaged by bushfire; I drove through thick smoke as fires blazed right up to the edge of the highway; smoke hung in the air for several of my first few days. The effects of the drought are visible everywhere, even to someone not yet familiar with the landscape. It was a shocking welcome for a fire ecologist.

Despite the concerning conditions, I'm super happy to be at Gatton and looking forward to teaching and working with my new collegues in SAFS. I'm developing new research projects in wildlife, fire ecology and environmental management. Students interested in these areas can contact me to discuss potential research projects.

I'll have a new UQ website soon, but will probably keep this one as an external research site... This site needs an overhaul and is currently a bit out-of-date, so please email me for more info on my current research or to develop new collaborations.

Check out the video for a short intro, or read the paper for the nitty gritty details...

Driscoll DA, Smith AL, Blight SR, Sellar I (2019). Interactions among body size, trophic level and dispersal traits predict beetle detectability and occurrence responses to fire. Ecological Entomology 10.1111/een.12798

June 2019: A scientist wears many hats: communicator, technician, advocate, theoretician, practitioner, teacher, student, mentor, mentee.

It's one of the challenging parts of being a researcher, but also one of the best. It means it's never boring* and you can exercise your creativity. This job suits someone with multiple aspects to their personality.

This was something I tried to convey in my recent public talk at Soapbox Science Ireland. Speaking to the general public on a Dublin city street, I spoke about the influence of climate change on fire frequency and what this means for plant evolution.

It was a great opportunity to link what I do in the lab to the growing global environmental movement; acknowledging the important role that the general public can play in protecting nature.

* a wise scientist once told me that if you're not bored yet, you don't have enough data.

Feb 2019: Ever wondered what traits make a plant species invasive? Is it small propagule size? High individual growth rate? Or just good old-fashioned height?

Jane Catford at Kings College London had pondered these questions. But she had also wondered: what makes a community invasible? And can we identify interactions between the traits of invaders and recipient communities that help explain biological invasions? To answer these questions, Jane and her team at Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve,  Minnesota USA collected trait data from a plant community with 164 taxa, where 50 invasive species had been experimentally added in 1992.

I joined Jane's team in 2015 to lead the statistical modelling for this project. We analysed the data using multi-species, hierarchical generalised linear models. These models allowed us to analyse invasion as a process, incorporating data from all invaders into the same model, while allowing the response of each invader to vary across environmental gradients (access the code here).

Invader-community interactions changed over a 20 year period, showing that invasion is context-dependent and long-term experiments are required to comprehensively understand plant invasions. Check out the paper to see the full story.

Catford JA, Smith AL, Wragg P, Clark AT, Kosmala M, Cavender-Bares J, Reich PB, Tilman D (2019). Traits linked with species invasiveness and community invasibility vary with time, stage and indicator of invasion in a long-term grassland experiment. Ecology Letters doi.org/10.1111/ele.13220.

Dec 2018: A couple of curious Rainbow Lorikeets visited me as I was eating breakfast in Mollymook, on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia. I was there to co-host a workshop on movement ecology with Pia Lentini and Philip Barton, which brought together staff from the Australian Government Environment Department and a group of international scientists.

Animals and plants (their pollen and seeds) need to move across landscapes, but cities, crops and roads and often get in their way. Unfortunately, it's difficult to get data on animals and plants when they move because it's often confined to a brief burst of activity, or the species are small and elusive so we can't see them moving. So movement is important but we don't know much about it, which makes conservation planning difficult. How do we allocate resources to restoration and habitat protection in a way that will preserve the movement of species?

Our paper arising from the Mollymook workshop presents a new framework for managing uncertaintainty in movement knowledge when making environmental decisions. Check it out here!

Smith AL, Kujala H, Lahoz-Monfort JJ, Guja LK, Burns EL, Nathan R, Alacs E, Barton PS, Bau S, Driscoll DA, Lentini PE, Mortelliti A, Rowe R, Buckley YM (2018). Managing uncertainty in movement knowledge for environmental decisions. Conservation Letters doi.org/10.1111/conl.12620

Nov 2018: I believe we need both bottom-up and top-down approaches to tackling diversity problems in science. Bottom-up could be seen as inspiring children and early career scientists and celebrating individuals who've made great leaps. While I think of top-down as structural changes and hard work from organisations. But when it comes to gender, we have an imbalance. The discourse is dominated by bottom-up approaches that put the responsibility on individual women to be more inspirational and extraordinary.

My new Perspective article argues that there should be a greater focus on what journals, publishers, societies and universities should do instead of focusing on stories and celebrations of extraordinary individuals overcoming barriers. I explain why this is the case and then provide a series of practical solutions that might help us achieve structural changes.

You can read the paper here: Smith A.L. (2018). Increasing editorial diversity: strategies for structural change. Fire 1: 42.

Or check out my blog post on Trinity College's excellent EcoEvo Blog.

Aug 2018: Most research on the effects of fire on ecosystems has focussed either on animals or plants, but rarely both. Differences in the strengths of research groups and the methods available for studying plants and animals created a divide in how we  approach fire ecology.

In our new paper, led by Luke Kelly at University of Melbourne, we argue that better integration of animal and plant paradigms in fire ecology will help make faster scientific progress. We provide a broad view of the processes affecting both plants and animals to assist fire management for biodiversity conservation. The paper is short and sweet, so there's no excuse not to read it now!

Kelly LT, Brotons L, Giljohann Katherine M, McCarthy Michael A, Pausas JG and Smith AL (2018). Bridging the divide: integrating animal and plant paradigms to secure the future of biodiversity in fire-prone ecosystems. Fire 1, 29, DOI 10.3390/fire1020029

July 2018: We’re often thrown in the deep end when it comes to learning new professional skills in a research career. Experience is a great teacher in the long term but it can take a lot of time to master new skills like reviewing papers and applying for grants. And the path can by windy, to put it lightly.

So I jumped at the chance to apply for the Associate Editor Mentoring Opportunity with Journal of Applied Ecology when I saw it advertised in 2017. I was drawn to the idea of working closely with a Senior Editor who would guide me on a hopefully less windy path than I’d experienced with learning other skills. I was delighted that my application was successful and I joined the Editorial Board in January 2018 for a two-year position. Keep reading...

Originally published on The Applied Ecologist's Blog, 5th July 2018