Australia is home to a diverse assemblage of plant species that display synchronised inter-annual variation in flower or seed output (i.e. masting). These plants include a semelparous masting bamboo, numerous iteroparous gymnosperms and angiosperms, and a diverse assemblage of species with fire-related forms of masting such as pyrogenic flowering and environmentally predictive masting. Here, we review the ecology and evolution of these species and provide recommendations for conservation and management of the systems they occur in.

Slime moulds are a unique group of fungus-like Amoebozoans that feed on bacteria and other microorganisms. Some slime moulds appear to be restricted largely to succulent plants, and we provide herein the first data on those species associated with invasive cacti in Australia. We report 12 species on members of the cactus family in Australia and provide data on the similarities between the assemblages of succulent-associated slime moulds in Australia and those in other regions of the world where cacti are native.