Metabolic Scaling Theory
The Metabolic Theory of Ecology (MTE) is one of the broadest attempts at a general theory for ecology. For plants, the theory describes processes from individuals to ecosystems and the theory has elicited both enthusiasm and controversy. We view MTE not as an ending point, but rather a collection of interrelated theories many of which require further development, evaluation and refinement. Our work in this area concentrates primarily on the relationship between plant geometry, function and biomass partitioning.
Plant Functional Traits
The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest in the explanatory power of plant functional traits. Characterizing variability in plant functional traits along resource gradients is becoming one of the most tractable ways to understand the generation and maintenance of community diversity. South Western Australia is an ideal place to perform such research due to its high diversity (a global hotspot) and endemism, and the fantastic and enigmatic traits of the plant species growing here.
Forest Structure
Individual tree size distributions (ISD) have been shown to have characteristic shapes that emerge from a balance of recruitment, growth and mortality. Analyses of forests worldwide have revealed that size frequency distributions are well characterized by a two parameter Weibull distribution whose shape and scale parameter have the potential to inform our understanding of size/mass distributions and demographic processes within and across forest and non-forest communities.
Biological Image Analysis
The advent of digital images has led to an explosion in the rate of new image generation and is one of the most common tools of the biologist and ecologist today. We’ve created new tools to help facilitate the translation from qualitative images to quantitative data. The first of these, LEAF GUI, is available online and you can learn about it here. We’ve also developed a tool to analyze stem cross sections called STEM GUI.
Our research could not have been done without the help of many hard working students a handful of whom are pictured here. From left to right from top: Brad Desmond, Erin Wendt, Kate Farrell, Farhad Amani, Belinda Martin, Jerome Yong, Libby Trevenen, Nadine Forde, Navot Kaur, Sarah Bird, Yingxin Huang and Sarah-Jane Knox.
Chuck Price 