Assoc. Prof. Martin Burd

Dr Martin Burd

Associate Professor
Evolutionary Ecology

Office: G17 Biology Building
Telephone: +61-3-9905-5667
Fax: +61-3-9905-5613
E-mail: Martin.Burd@monash.edu

School of Biological Sciences
Monash University
VIC 3800, Australia

Links

• Summary
• Research
• Publications

Research interests

• Evolutionary ecology of flowering plant reproduction:
  Sex allocation, ovule number evolution
  Pollination biology
  Plant life history evolution
• Behaviour and social organisation in ant colonies:
  Foraging ecology of leaf-cutting ants
  Traffic and collective movement by ants
  Ants as models of crowd behaviour and crowd panics

Honours projects for prospective students

Research highlights

• Bateman's principle fails to explain reproductive patterns in plants:
  Burd, M. 1994. Bateman's principle and plant reproduction: the role of pollen limitation in fruit and seed set. Botanical Review 60: 83-139.
• The first application of traffic engineering theories to the traffic of ant trails:
  Burd, M., D. Archer, N. Aranwela and D. J. Stradling. 2002. Traffic dynamics of the leaf-cutting ant Atta cephalotes. American Naturalist 159: 283-293.
• The famous "spandrels" argument of Gould and Lewontin applied to social insect behaviours:
  Burd, M., and J. J. Howard. 2008. Optimality in a partitioned task performed by social insects. Biology Letters 4: 627-629.
• The evolution of ovule number per flower in angiosperms, a plant analogue of clutch size:
  Burd, M., T.-L. Ashman, D. R. Campbell, M. R. Dudash, M. O. Johnston, T. M. Knight, S. J. Mazer, R. J. Mitchell, J. A. Steets, and J. C. Vamosi. 2009. Ovule number per flower in a world of unpredictable pollination. American Journal of Botany 96: 1159-1167.

Recent publications

• Shiwakoti, N., M. Sarvi, and M. Burd. 2013. Using non-human biological entities to understand pedestrian crowd behaviour under emergency conditions. Safety Science (in press).
• Miller, J. T., and M. Burd. 2013. Australia's Acacia: unrecognized convergent evolution. Chapter 2 in Invasion Biology and Ecosystem Theory: Insights from a Continent in Transition (H. Prins and I. Gordon, eds), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K. (in press)
• Shrestha, M., A. G. Dyer, and M. Burd. 2013. Evaluating the spectral discrimination capabilities of different pollinators and their effect on the evolution of flower colors. Communicative and Integrative Biology 6(3): e24000
• Shrestha, M., A. G. Dyer, S. Boyd-Gerny, B. B.M. Wong, and M. Burd. 2013. Shades of red: bird- pollinated flowers target the specific colour discrimination abilities of avian vision. New Phytologist 198: 301-310
• Burd, M., A. Martínez Bauer, and M. R. Shrestha. 2012. The evolutionary ecology of pollination and the functional biology of agricultural plants. Chapter 4, Pragmatic Evolution: Applications of Evolutionary Theory (Aldo Poiani, ed.), Cambridge University Press.
• Bruce, A. I., and M. Burd. 2012. Allometric scaling of foraging rate with trail dimensions in leaf-cutting ants. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 279: 2442-2447.
• Dias, C., M. Sarvi, N. Shiwakoti, M. Burd. 2012. Turning angle effect on emergency egress: experimental evidence and pedestrian crowd simulation. Transportation Research Record 2312: 120-127
• Waksberg, A. J., A. B. Smith, and M. Burd. 2012. Relative comparison and the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives: a model of decision making in an ecologically realistic environment. Journal of Bioeconomics 14: 197-215.
• Kerswell, K. J., and M. Burd. 2012. Frequency-dependent and density-dependent larval competition between life-history strains of a fly, Lucilia cuprina. Ecological Entomology 37: 109-116.

 
Complete publication list