AUT - Len Gillman
Len Gillman
Qualifications:
- B.Sc, Ph.D. (Auckland).
Job Title/Role:
- Senior lecturer
Contact info:
Phone: +64 9 921 9999 ext 8213
Email: len.gillman@aut.ac.nz
Teaching Areas:
Biodiversity and evolution, Terrestrial Ecology, Environmental Law, Resource Management.
Areas of Research and areas supervised:
I am interested in questions of causation for global patterns in species richness and in particular the link between productivity, rate of microevolution and biodiversity patterns. I have been involved in testing for the influence of productivity on rates of microevolution in plants. Current work includes the influence of population size and energy on microevolution rates in mammals and birds.
Research Summary:
Len Gillman is an evolutionary ecologist. His major research interest is in differential rates of molecular evolution and the implications of this for global patterns in species richness.
He completed his BSc. at the age of 37, having previously being a landscape gardening contractor, a landscape architect, and an advertising agency studio graphics manager. He has been active in conservation in New Zealand since 1984, having held executive positions on Native Forests Action Council and Maruia Society and having acted as a board director of the Environmental Defence Society. He completed his PhD in Auckland, at the age of 47, on forest seedling damage and mortality. From his PhD work, he published six papers.
Len Gillman has spent much of his life climbing and has climbed in many locations around the world including Yosemite National Park where he climbed the Nose route on El Capitan in 1979 – a three-day 1000-meter vertical granite route. He has done the first ascent of approximately seventy rock-climbs in New Zealand and wrote the rock-climbing guide to Whanganui Bay (the North Island’s premier rock-climbing area). Len Gillman has tramped in most parts of New Zealand and cycles approximately 25 km to work.
Selected publications:
Gillman, L. N., and S. D. Wright. 2006. The influence of productivity on the species richness of plants: a critical assessment. Ecology 87:1234-1243.
Wright, S., J. Keeling, and L. Gillman. 2006. The road from Santa Rosalia: a faster tempo of evolution in tropical climates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 103:7718-7722.
Gillman, L. N., and S. D. Wright. 2007. Molecular evolution has wheels in the tropics. Biologist 54.
Gillman, L. N. 2008. Assessment of sustainable forest management in New Zealand indigenous forest. New Zealand Geographer 64:57-67.
Corfield, J., L. Gillman, and S. Parson. 2008. Vocalizations of the North Island Brown Kiwi (Apteryx mantelli). The Auk 125:326-335.
Gillman, L. N., and J. Ogden. 2005. Microsite heterogeneity in litterfall risk to seedlings. Austral Ecology 30:497-504.
Gillman, L. N., J. Ogden, S. D. Wright, K. L. Stewart, and D. P. Walsh. 2004. The influence of macro-litterfall and forest structure on litterfall damage to seedlings. Austral Ecology 29:305-312.
Gillman, L. N., and J. Ogden. 2003. Seedling mortality and damage due to non-trophic animal interactions in a northern New Zealand forest. Austral Ecology 28:48-50.
Gillman, L. N., S. D. Wright, and J. Ogden. 2003. Response of forest tree seedlings to simulated litterfall damage. Plant Ecology 169:53-60.