Tricia Wevill

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Lecturer at Deakin University

Anthropogenic biodiversity decline threatens the functioning of ecosystems and the many benefits they provide to humanity¹. As well as causing species losses in directly affected locations, human influence might also reduce biodiversity in relatively unmodified vegetation if far-reaching anthropogenic effects trigger local extinctions and hinder re...

Snowpatch plant communities, which occur in parts of alpine landscapes where snow accumulates and persists well into the summer, are highly sensitive to climate change. The formation of persistent soil seed banks is recognised as a critical component of a plant community’s resilience to a changing environment. However, our understanding of the ecol...

Context The plant pathogen Phytophthora cinnamomi causes severe declines in susceptible vegetation, including loss of plant species, vegetation structure and fauna abundance. Grasstrees (Xanthorrhoea spp.) are keystone species that provide optimal habitat for vertebrates and invertebrates and are highly susceptible to the pathogen. Although effects...

Teaching assistants (TAs) have a major impact on the undergraduate science student experience, and therefore training TAs is critical to support engagement and learning. We ran a one-day TA training program for two years and found that participation in the program increased TAs’ reflective practice and student-centered teaching over a semester of t...

Alpine plants in Australia are increasingly exposed to more frequent drought and heatwaves, with significant consequences for physiological stress responses. Acclimation is a critical feature that allows plants to improve tolerance to environmental extremes by directly altering their physiology or morphology. Yet it is unclear how plant performance...

Maintaining ecosystem processes within patches of remnant vegetation is critical to minimising biodiversity loss in agricultural landscapes. Foundation species—habitat‐forming organisms that interact with many other species—are therefore a priority for conservation and restoration in farming areas. Triodia spp. grasses are foundation species of ari...

Alpine plants in Australia are increasingly exposed to more frequent drought and heatwaves, with significant consequences for physiological stress responses. Acclimation is a critical feature that allows plants to improve tolerance to environmental extremes through directly altering their physiology or morphology. Yet it is unclear how plant perfor...

With rising temperatures and events contributing climate change, the world is facing extreme weather patterns. Recently, Australia was hit hard by bushfires, the most devastating fires ever faced by the country. The economic damage reported was nearly one billion Australian dollars and an estimated 3 billion native animals killed or adversely affec...

Biodiversity faces many threats and these can interact to produce outcomes that may not be predicted by considering their effects in isolation. Habitat loss and fragmentation (hereafter 'fragmentation') and altered fire regimes are important threats to biodiversity, but their interactions have not been systematically evaluated across the globe. In...

This study evaluated how the pairing of sessional teaching staff in a large first-year undergraduate science subject provided context-specific professional development for sessional teaching staff. We used a likert-scale questionnaire to ask sessional staff to rate how effectively peer-pairing in the classroom contributed to a range of teaching ski...

Proliferation of redundant terms in ecology and conservation slows progress and creates confusion. ‘Countryside biogeography’ has been promoted as a new framework for conservation in production landscapes, so may offer a replacement for other concepts used by landscape ecologists. We conducted a systematic review to assess whether the 'countryside...

Nutrient cycling is greatly influenced by dominant plants that contribute high amounts of leaf litter to soils; however, less-dominant and rare species can play keystone roles in nutrient cycling if they have unique nutrient acquisition traits and provide high-quality litter. In many parts of the world, wildfire is likely to become more frequent an...

Rare species can play important functional roles, but human-induced changes to disturbance regimes, such as fire, can inadvertently affect these species. We examined the influence of prescribed burns on the recruitment and diversity of plant species within a temperate forest in southeastern Australia, with a focus on species that were rare prior to...

Riparian ecosystems are among the most degraded systems in the landscape, and there has been substantial investment in their restoration. Consequently, monitoring restoration interventions offers opportunities to further develop the science of riparian restoration, particularly how to move from small-scale implementation to a broader landscape scal...

Relatively little is known of the environmental determinants of fine-scale patterns of tree distribution and regeneration on inland dune systems in semi-arid regions. Trees in semi-arid regions can experience extremes of temperature, and resource availability can vary both temporally and spatially. Climate change may disrupt these fine-scale patter...

Plants species have been shown to improve the performance of stormwater biofiltration systems, particularly in removal of N and P. Recent research has shown that plants vary in their contribution to pollutant removal but little is known about the type of plant that is best suited to use in biofilters in terms of survival, growth rate, and performan...

Biofiltration systems use vegetation to improve efficiency of pollutant removal from stormwater, but little is known of how plants vary in their capacity to improve biofilter effectiveness. We used a pot trial of 20 Australian species to investigate how species vary in the removal of pollutants from semisynthetic storm water passing through a soil...

Thesis (B.A.)--California Polytechnic State University, 1995. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 22). Microfiche.