Category Archives: It’s All About the Plants

Salt marsh restoration on Torrens Island

It’s All About the Plants
Tuesday, 3 November 2015, 10:00–12:00
Ground Floor Meeting Room
State Herbarium of South Australia
Old Tram Barn Building, Hackney Road

by Doug Fotheringham
State Herbarium of South Australia

Turning sand dunes into salt marshes on Torrens Island. What happened then and how does it look 25 years later.

Doug is the newly appointed Hon. Research Associate of the State Herbarium of South Australia and will speak about his involvement with the restoration of the vegetation of the island and his recent visit in Aug. 2015.

The same site on Torrens Island in 1988 (left) and 2015 (right). (Photos D. Fotheringham)

All Herbarium staff, honoraries, volunteers, students and guests welcome. Morning tea provided.

Seminar postponement

Please note that the next It’s All About The Plants seminar has been postponed until next month. On Tuesday, 3 November Doug Fotheringham (our newest State Herbarium Honorary Research Associate) will give a presentation.

Ecology in Australia and elsewhere

It’s All About the Plants
Tuesday, 8 Sep. 2015, 10:00–12:00
Goodman Building Lecture Theatre,
adjacent to the State Herbarium of South Australia
Adelaide Botanic Garden, Hackney Road

by José Facelli
Ecology & Environmental Science, The University of Adelaide

The traditional view of ecologists is that vegetation is determined by the environment. However, there is strong evidence that individual plants can actually modify the local environment and that these modifications can have profound effects on the rest of the plant community and on ecosystem function. Importantly plants introduce spatial heterogeneity into the environment, which in turn helps to maintain diversity by creating patches that favour different species.

Almost without noticing I have been addressing these issues for over 20 years. I welcome this opportunity to bring together and share research done by myself and other members of my laboratory. I will show how living (and dead!) plants can drive ecological processes, and the importance of this for management, conservation and restoration of native vegetation.

Associate Professor José (Jope) Facelli studied Agricultural Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, but soon become bored of crops and interested in natural ecosystems. This lead to research on the effects of grazing in Patagonia and in the Pampas. He eventually completed a PhD (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey) on the effects of leaf litter on successional processes. In 1992 he moved to Adelaide where he established the Terrestrial Plant Ecology Lab. Currently the research in this laboratory includes topics as diverse as the role of soil microbes in plant invasions, the effects of fire on populations of orchids and their pollinators, and the interactions between plant parasites and their hosts.

All Herbarium staff, honoraries, volunteers, students and guests welcome. Morning tea provided.

From snow melt to seashore: fungal tales from the land of the long white cloud

It’s All About the Plants
Tuesday, 16 June 2015, 10:00–12:00
Ground Floor Meeting Room / Tea-room,
State Herbarium of South Australia,
Old Tram Barn Building, Hackney Road

by Teresa Lebel
Senior Mycologist , National Herbarium of Victoria, Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne

I have just returned from a two year fellowship in New Zealand, where I was fortunate to be able to work on a series of different projects and travel quite a bit around the islands. New Zealand has an amazing range of ecological zones and a diverse plant flora (including many introduced species), all of which provide an array of substrates and hosts for fungi. While my particular research interests are focused on the taxonomy and phylogenetic relationships of truffles and truffle-like fungi, I am also intrigued by interactions between fungi and other organisms, whether positive or negative, or in balance. In this talk I will provide snapshots of a series of fungal projects; and every completed project generates many more questions!

All Herbarium staff, honoraries, volunteers, students and guests welcome.
Morning tea provided.