My pronouns are she/her
Ecology, Biogeography, Taxonomy and Systematics of the Mahogany family (Meliaceae), Tropical willows (Salicaceae) and Achariaceae in SE Asia, Australasia and the western Pacific.
Frugivores and seed dispersal, especially in the tropics. Most recently supervisor, jointly with Stephen Harris, of MBiol 4th-year project on fruit-feeding in lemurs in Madagascar.
My research is in plant species radiations, biodiversity, classification, tropical rain forest regeneration, interactions between plants and animals in the tropical rain forest ecosystem and historical biogeography of the Indo-Australasian Archipelago. The empirical base for this research is the largest genus in the mahogany family, Aglaia, with almost 130 accepted species, ranging from India to the western Pacific and equally well represented at the species level on the two sides of one of the world’s major faunal boundaries, Wallace’s Line. The region Wallacea represents the collision zone of four tectonic plates and is where the Laurasian and Gondwanan faunal regions meet and intermingle to a limited degree. Species radiations in plant groups like Aglaia, that have successfully and repeatedly crossed the deep oceanic divides between these tectonic plates, represent a rich resource for exploring the history of evolution of new species and the factors that might have driven such allopatric speciation. I collaborate with molecular biologists, taxonomists, phytochemists, ecologists and dispersal biologists from Australia, Germany, Austria, U.S., Singapore, Thailand and India, who base their research partly on my publications and my knowledge of these trees.
