Dr Andrew Gunn - Honours Projects

Banded Vegetation Patterns in Arid Environments

Supervisor: Dr Chris Lee, Andrew Gunn
Field of Study: Geomorphology

Location: Monash Clayton and Boolcoomatta (near Broken Hill)

Banded vegetation is a type of periodic vegetation pattern that appears as laterally continuous vegetated stripes (groves) separated by bare stripes (intergroves). Often, these patterns extend along the contours of shallow slopes. These slopes are thought facilitate runoff-run-on processes that enable vegetation growth beyond what local precipitation availability might predict. Thus, banded vegetation systems act as refugia that maintain favourable microenvironments supporting both floral and faunal diversity. Despite sharing a common name, these microenvironments of banded vegetation are found in a variety of arid landscapes across the globe. Species composition, aridity, soil and slope are some of the many axes that may vary between sites, with some areas with banded vegetation being generally considered flat. With minimal slope, overland water may no longer flow as expected across unvegetated, impermeable intergroves to infiltrate vegetated, permeable groves. Would such a system be subject to the same runoff-run-on
process to form banded vegetation or are other processes in play?
The aim of this project is to characterise how factors such as slope, species composition, soil and aridity interact to form banded vegetation patterns in SE Australia.

Note: This project includes very remote field work at Boolcoomatta Reserve, South Australia and may involve long periods of camping in tents with basic facilities.

Possible Sampling Techniques: Belt transects, vegetation surveys, GPS RTK, aerial drone LiDAR (in conjunction with PhD student)

Planetary surfaces

Supervisor: Andrew Gunn
Field of Study: geomorphology, planetary science
What can we learn about the history of climate and geology from the surfaces of planets? Often observational data of other planetary bodies, such as Mars and Titan, is limited mostly to orbital imagery of their surfaces. We can use our understanding of how landforms such as dunes, lakes, rivers, and mountains evolve to infer what conditions are like on these planetary bodies, now and in the past. If you're interested in this topic we can discuss a more specific project.