Mark Ooi

UNSW Sydney | UNSW · School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences (BEES)

The dynamics surrounding seeds are arguably the most important drivers of population persistence in semi-arid ecosystems. To fully understand plant population persistence and, in particular, to predict the impacts of changing climatic conditions, we need to develop a clearer picture of the ecological consequences of variation in seed dormancy and g...

Background and aims Seed dormancy enhances fitness by preventing seeds from germinating when the probability of seedling survival and recruitment is low. The onset of physical dormancy is sensitive to humidity during ripening; however, the implications of this mechanism for seed bank dynamics have not been quantified. This study proposes a model th...

Variation in dormancy thresholds among species is rarely studied but may provide a basis to better understand the mechanisms controlling population persistence. Incorporating dormancy-breaking temperature thresholds into existing trait frameworks could improve predictions regarding seed bank persistence, and subsequently species resilience in respo...

1. According to the Stress Gradient Hypothesis, facilitation and competition are considered to be important at opposite ends of an environmental gradient. However, recent research has questioned the generality of this idea. One limitation is that the small-scale and short-term nature of much research into plant interactions limits our understanding...

Background and aims Understanding the mechanistic effects of climate change on species key life-history stages is essential for predicting ecological responses. In fire-prone regions, long-term seed banks allow post-fire recovery and persistence of plant populations. For physically dormant species, seed bank longevity depends on the maintenance of...

Variation in plant growth strategies facilitate species' coexistence in a community. Some functional traits are predicted to influence the growth rates of developing individuals by capturing trade‐offs in resource allocation. However, despite being used broadly in community ecology, the assumed generality and predictability of trait‐growth relation...

With large wildfires becoming more frequent1,2, we must rapidly learn how megafires impact biodiversity to prioritize mitigation and improve policy. A key challenge is to discover how interactions among fire-regime components, drought and land tenure shape wildfire impacts. The globally unprecedented3,4 2019–2020 Australian megafires burnt more tha...

• Theory suggests that the dominance of resprouting and seeding, two key mechanisms through which plants persist with recurrent fire, both depend on other traits and vary with fire regime. However, these patterns remain largely untested over broad scales. • We analysed the relationships between average fire frequency, derived from MODIS satellite d...

Premise Obligate fire ephemerals are annual plants that have germination and reproduction cued by fire occurrence, persisting between fire events in a long‐lived soil seed bank. Within these species, gene flow is restricted not only geographically but also temporally because individuals are limited to reproducing with others affected by the same fi...

Fire regimes are changing globally, leading to an increased need for management interventions to protect human lives and interests, potentially conflicting with biodiversity conservation. We conceptualized 5 major aspects of the process required to address threats to flora and used this conceptual model to examine and identify areas for improvement...

Dormancy in seeds is a key persistence mechanism for many flowering plants. Physically dormant (PY) seeds have water impermeable seed coats, and in fire-prone systems a common mechanism for dormancy release is fire-induced soil heating. However, the thermal thresholds innate to seeds with PY may be influenced by vegetation, climate, and fire regime...

In fire‐prone ecosystems, plant traits are influenced by the fire regime, thus reproduction and establishment can be altered by this disturbance. Changes in fire frequency and history can therefore influence seed and germination traits. We investigated the effects of short‐term fire exclusion on seed and germination traits of species from tropical...

Prescribed burning is a management tool used for both management of fuel loads and for ecological purposes across fire prone areas. While in temperate areas wildfires usually occur during the hottest summer months, prescribed burns are generally conducted in autumn and spring, when conditions are more suitable for controlling fire. Orchids maintain...

Traits with intuitive names, a clear scope and explicit description are essential for all trait databases. The lack of unified, comprehensive, and machine-readable plant trait definitions limits the utility of trait databases, including reanalysis of data from a single database, or analyses that integrate data across multiple databases. Both can on...

Abstract Conservation and mitigation translocations aim for similar positive outcomes for species under threat, however different motivations drive their implementation. Despite the clear human component behind motivation, there has been limited examination of practitioner perceptions and how they compare across the conservation and mitigation sect...

Many countries have legislation intended to limit or ofset the impact of anthropogenic disturbance and development on threatened plants. Translocations are often integral to those mitigation policies. When translocation is used exclusively to mitigate development impacts, it is often termed a ‘mitigation translocation.’ However, both the terminolog...

Prescribed burning is a management tool used for both management of fuel loads and for ecological purposes across fire prone areas. While in temperate areas wildfires usually occur during the hottest summer months, prescribed burns are generally conducted in autumn and spring to reduce risk. Plant species such as orchids are adapted to summer fires...

Questions Prescribed burning is a key tool for managing vegetation for conservation in fire‐prone ecosystems around the world. Plants are adapted to particular fire regimes, made up of components including fire frequency and seasonality. However, burning outside historical regime parameters may impact species recovery and subsequent community assem...

The crises of biodiversity loss, climate change and food security are challenges faced by the conservation and agriculture sectors. We outline, via presentations from the Australasian Seed Science Conference, how seed science is addressing these challenges. Research is focused on practical solutions for seed bank management, seed use and biodiversi...

Background Climate change is driving global fire regimes toward greater extremes, potentially threatening plant species that are adapted to historic fire regimes. Successful conservation of threatened plant species depends upon improving our understanding of how they respond to these changing fire regimes in fire prone regions. The 2019–2020 Austra...

Conditions conducive to fires are becoming increasingly common and widespread under climate change. Recent fire events across the globe have occurred over unprecedented scales, affecting a diverse array of species and habitats. Understanding biodiversity responses to such fires is critical for conservation. Quantifying post‐fire recovery is problem...

Introduction Biocrust cyanobacteria have a large potential as biofertilizers for restoring degraded ecosystems because of their ability to improve soil nutrition and stabilisation, and to produce metabolites such as phytohormones to enhance plant growth. However, important aspects regarding the effects of cyanobacteria on native plants, such as met...

Traits with intuitive names, a clear scope and explicit description are essential for all trait databases. Reanalysis of data from a single database, or analyses that integrate data across multiple databases, can only occur if researchers are confident the trait concepts are consistent within and across sources. The lack of a unified, comprehensive...

The intersection of fire, land use transformations, and climate change is putting Mediterranean climate-type ecosystems at risk of soil degradation and loss of ecosystem services. Ondik et al. (2022b) showed that in a Mediterranean dry sclerophyll woodland of South Australia, high severity fire and clearing and grazing practices impacted both physi...

Many countries have legislation intended to limit or offset the impact of anthropogenic disturbance and development on threatened plants. Translocations are often integral to those mitigation policies. When translocation is used exclusively to mitigate development impacts, it is often termed a ‘mitigation translocation.’ However, both the terminolo...

Abstract Population genetics and understanding of mating systems provide fundamental information for conservation planning. Pairing these methods is a powerful tool in the study of threatened species, however, they are rarely applied in concert. We examined the mating system and used molecular genetics to measure pairwise kinship and the potential...

Australian plant diversity is maintained by variable fire regimes, and a single fire event, even one as large as the 2019-20 season, will have both positive and negative outcomes for species. We describe how impacts were assessed after the 2019-20 fires using vulnerability assessments and evidence from field-based observations. Many species are rec...

Northern peatlands are globally important carbon stores, but with increasing fire frequency, the re-establishment of bryophytes (notably Sphagnum) becomes crucial for their carbon sequestration. Smoke-responsive germination is a common trait in seeds in fire-prone ecosystems but has not been demonstrated in bryophyte spores. To investigate the pote...

Globally, many species and ecosystems are experiencing landscape-scale wildfires (‘megafires’) and these events are predicted to increase in frequency and severity as the climate warms. Consequently, the capability to rapidly assess the likely impacts of such large fires and identify potential risks they pose to the persistence of species and ecosy...

Fire directly impacts soil properties responsible for soil function and can result in soil degradation. Across the globe, climate change-induced droughts and elevated temperatures are exacerbating fire regime severity, breadth, and frequency, thus posing a threat to soil function and dependent ecosystem services. In Australia, the 2019–2020 fire se...

Seed dormancy is the key driver regulating seed germination, hence is fundamental to the seedling recruitment life‐history stage and population persistence. However, despite the importance of physical dormancy (PY) in timing post‐fire germination, the mechanism driving dormancy‐break within seed coats remains surprisingly unclear. We suggest that s...

Background Climate change is driving global fire regimes to become more extreme, potentially threatening plant species that are adapted to less extreme, historic fire regimes. Developing a better understanding of how threatened plant species might respond to a more extreme fire regime is key to successful future conservation in fire prone regions....

Wildfires are increasing in size and severity and fire seasons are lengthening, largely driven by climate and land-use change. Many plant species from fire-prone ecosystems are adapted to specific fire regimes corresponding to historical conditions and shifts beyond these bounds may have severe impacts on vegetation recovery and long-term species p...

Wildfires in 2019–2020 broke global records for extent and severity, affirming the arrival of the megafire era. Frequent megafires reflect changes to fire regimes that can negatively impact species and ecosystems. Here, we offer what we believe to be the first comprehensive analysis of megafire impacts on southeastern Australian vegetation communit...

Fire regimes shape plant communities but are shifting with changing climate. More frequent fires of increasing intensity are burning across a broader range of seasons. Despite this, impacts that changes in fire season have on plant populations, or how they interact with other fire regime elements, are still relatively understudied. We asked (a) how...

Climate change is increasing the frequency, intensity, and size of fire events due to longer and more sustained droughts and heatwaves. The potential for regeneration of plants from seeds in fire-prone regions that will be impacted by climate change is due to (1) changes in the environmental conditions experienced by parent plants, seeds, and seedl...

Aim Existing abiotic and biotic threats to plant species (e.g., disease, drought, invasive species) affect their capacity to recover post‐fire. We use a new, globally applicable framework to assess the vulnerability of 26,062 Australian plant species to a suite of active threats after the 2019–2020 fires. Location Australia. Time period 2019–2020...

Ploidy and species range size or threat status have been linked to variation in phenotypic and phenological seed and seedling traits, including seed size, germination rate (speed) and seedling stature. There is surprisingly little known about the ecological outcomes of relationships between ploidy, key plant traits and the drivers of range size. He...

Translocation of plants is used globally as a conservation action to bolster existing or establish new populations of threatened species and is usually communicated in academic publications or case studies. Translocation is also used to mitigate or offset impacts of urbanization and development but is less often publicly published. Irrespective of...

The 2019–20 Australian fire season was heralded as emblematic of the catastrophic harm wrought by climate change. Similarly extreme wildfire seasons have occurred across the globe in recent years. Here, we apply a pyrogeographic lens to the recent Australian fires to examine the range of causes, impacts and responses. We find that the extensive are...

Seed germination in response to fire-related cues has been widely studied in species from fire-prone ecosystems. However, the germination characteristics of species from non-fire-prone ecosystems, such as the saline-alkaline grassland, where fire occasionally occurs accidentally or is used as a management tool, have been less studied. Here, we inve...

Fire seasonality (the time of year of fire occurrence) has important implications for a wide range of demographic processes in plants, including seedling recruitment. However, the underlying mechanisms of fire-driven recruitment of species with physiological seed dormancy remain poorly understood, limiting effective fire and conservation management...

The cover image is based on the Invited Review Limits to post‐fire vegetation recovery under climate change by Rachael H. Nolan et al., https://doi.org/10.1111/pce.14176. The cover image is based on the Invited Review Limits to post‐fire vegetation recovery under climate change by Rachael H. Nolan et al., https://doi.org/10.1111/pce.14176.

We introduce the AusTraits database - a compilation of values of plant traits for taxa in the Australian flora (hereafter AusTraits). AusTraits synthesises data on 448 traits across 28,640 taxa from field campaigns, published literature, taxonomic monographs, and individual taxon descriptions. Traits vary in scope from physiological measures of per...

Record-breaking fire seasons in many regions across the globe raise important questions about plant community responses to shifting fire regimes (i.e., changing fire frequency, severity, and seasonality). Here, we examine the impacts of climate-driven shifts in fire regimes on vegetation communities, and likely responses to fire coinciding with sev...

Fire is an integral part of many ecosystems and recent record-breaking fires in natural systems around the world are indicative of changes occurring to the fire regime. Fire seasonality is one regime element that is shifting, and can impact the reproductive success of plant species, but rarely receives the spotlight when impacts of fire regimes are...

Translocation of threatened plants is increasingly being used as a conservation or mitigation action. The success of this practice is mixed and methods to increase likelihood of success are commonly investigated. Using a long-lived perennial shrub endemic to the Sydney Basin, Australia, as a case study, we examined the role of pre-planting nutrient...

Casestudy of Hibbertia spanantha translocation and propagation. Sydney Basin Bioregion. Sydney, Australia

The Bendethera Shrublands are a unique and fascinating ecological community restricted to less than 100 hectares on a series of steep limestone outcrops in the Deua River valley. The community is characterised by a dense shrub layer to around 7.5 metres height and dominated by Acacia covenyi, a locally endemic species, whose blue foliage forms a st...

How much leaf area do insects eat? A data set of insect herbivory sampled globally with a standardized protocol. Ecology 102(4): Abstract. Herbivory is ubiquitous. Despite being a potential driver of plant distribution and performance, herbivory remains largely undocumented. Some early attempts have been made to review, globally, how much leaf area...

Questions In fire‐prone ecosystems, fire can enhance the flowering and fruiting of many species, a strategy assumed to be well represented in savanna. Despite this, there are surprisingly few studies assessing how prevalent fire‐stimulated flowering is. Thus, we asked: (a) are there differences in the reproductive phenology of Cerrado plants betwee...

We introduce the AusTraits database - a compilation of measurements of plant traits for taxa in the Australian flora (hereafter AusTraits). AusTraits synthesises data on 375 traits across 29230 taxa from field campaigns, published literature, taxonomic monographs, and individual taxa descriptions. Traits vary in scope from physiological measures of...

For physiologically dormant (PD) species in fire-prone environments, dormancy can be both complex due to the interaction between fire and seasonal cues, and extremely deep due to long intervals between recruitment events. Due to this complexity, there are knowledge gaps particularly surrounding the dormancy depth and cues of long-lived perennial PD...

Background and Aims Different seed dormancy classes control the timing of germination via different cues. The ecological dissimilarities between classes therefore suggest that they are likely to be subject to different selective pressures, and that species within each class will have diverse functional responses, we aimed to investigate this by ass...

We recently published a framework of demographic mechanisms that may impact plant population responses to changes in fire seasonality [1]. This framework now includes eight mechanisms identified in [1,2] and further detailed in [3,4]. Subsequently, Cao et al. [5] have proposed that seed dormancy class, based on the dormancy classification scheme of...

The unprecedented scale of the 2019–2020 eastern Australian bushfires exemplifies the challenges that scientists and conservation biologists face monitoring the effects on biodiversity in the aftermath of large-scale environmental disturbances. After a large-scale disturbance, conservation policy and management actions need to be both timely and in...

The impacts of the 2019/2020 fires on NSW plant species were assessed using an expert-derived framework that addressed 11 key factors likely to drive risk to plants from fire or during post-fire recovery. This assessment builds on the national assessment of risk to plants as a results of these fires (Gallagher 2020) by providing additional NSW data...

The unprecedented scale of the 2019-2020 eastern Australian bushfires exemplifies the challenges that scientists and conservation biologists face monitoring the effects of biodiversity in the aftermath of large-scale environmental disturbances. After a large-scale disturbance there are conservation policy and management actions that need to be both...

• Dormancy cycling is a key mechanism that contributes to the maintenance of long‐term persistent soil seed banks, but has not been recorded in long‐lived woody shrub species from fire‐prone environments. Such species rely on seed banks and dormancy break as important processes for post‐fire recruitment and recovery. • We used germination experimen...

Fire is an important driver shaping the composition of plant communities in Australia. Fire ephemerals are a unique element of the fire-vegetation relationship, emerging in the first few months after fire and persisting only for one to several years. These species have a strong dependence on fire to germinate and, as ephemerals only live a short ti...

Fire management at the landscape scale may be detrimental to threatened species restricted to fire refugia, such as riparian zones, if their fire response is assumed based on the broader vegetation community type. Conserving threatened plant species in fire-prone habitats requires understanding how life-history traits allow persistence under prevai...

Cyanobacteria are photosynthetic bacteria that form a fundamental part of soil biocrusts, enhance soil function and structure, and can promote plant growth. We assessed the potential of cyanobacteria as a seed bio‐primer for mine‐site restoration in an arid region in Western Australia, examining its effects on native plant growth and the characteri...

Premise - Although fire cues (high temperatures and smoke) influence seed germination in numerous species from fire‐prone environments, their effects on seed germination of species from neotropical savannas are poorly understood. Methods - We exposed seeds of eight grass species from the Cerrado, the Brazilian savanna to heat‐shock (80°C or 110°C...

Altered fire regimes resulting from climate change and human activity threaten many terrestrial ecosystems. However, we lack a holistic and detailed understanding of the effects of altering one key fire regime component – season of fire. Altered fire seasonality can strongly affect post-fire recovery of plant populations through interactions with p...

It is often assumed that declines in native vegetation associated with alien plant invasion are driven by competition between plants for limited resources. However, invasion can also impact native plants through recruitment limitation mechanisms. We examined the effects of Cenchrus ciliaris L. (buffel grass, an alien pasture species) on the seed vi...

Implemented burns are a primary source of fire in natural systems and occur outside of the wildfire season. However, the impacts of fire season shift on native plant species are rarely studied. Understanding fire season effects are particularly important for managing threatened species, which are often the focus of managed burns. To assess the impa...

Aims To test the effects of characteristic ecological gradients in peatlands including oxygen-deficiency and allelopathy on Sphagnum spore persistence. Methods We determined the initial viability of Sphagnum spores and then stored the spores for 60 days, either dry, in ultrapure water, peatland surface water or Sphagnum water leachate (the latter...

Translocation is the deliberate transfer of plants or regenerative plant material from an ex situ collection or natural population to a new location, usually in the wild. It includes reintroduction, introduction, reinforcement, assisted migration and assisted colonization. This document provides best-practice guidelines for conservation translocati...

Trait‐based approaches have improved our understanding of plant evolution, community assembly and ecosystem functioning. A major challenge for the upcoming decades is to understand the functions and evolution of early life‐history traits, across levels of organization and ecological strategies. Although a variety of seed traits are critical for dis...

Background and aims Cyanobacteria from biocrusts can enhance soil function and structure, a critical objective when restoring degraded dryland ecosystems. Large-scale restoration of biodiversity requires direct seeding of native plant species, and bio-priming seeds with cyanobacteria is a potential method of initiating enhanced soil functioning. Th...