Day 290

Yeah, sooo it's been 281 days since my last blog post - my bad. Turns out doing a PhD is hard work (lol) so I've been a little busy. 

Update time!

 - I'm super stoked because my project was awarded the Holsworth Wildlife Research Endowment! The funding meant that I could purchase a drone in order to take high quality aerial photos of my field sites.

In this shot I managed to accidentally capture a sleeping kangaroo (she didn't seem to care about my drone at all). These images will be used to estimate plant community composition more accurately, and save me a lot of time. They'll also mean I avoid trampling my sites as much as possible, protecting habitat (not just for this roo, but for my study species such as quokkas, quendas and mardo). 

- I've completed three out of four of my vegetation sampling field trips: I've surveyed karri forest, jarrah forest and just recently heathland. 

In a couple of weeks I'll head back down to Northcliffe to survey what will likely be my most challenging sites - the riparian areas. Riparian vegetation is the vegetation that grows along rivers and watercourses, so it's usually very dense - especially in this part of Western Australia, as it's the area that gets the most rainfall in the whole state! So stay tuned to see how we go (I'm thinking slowly!)

- I'm heading to the Ecological Society of Australia conference next week - this year it's combined with the New Zealand Ecological Society, it's called EcoTAS and it's set to be pretty awesome. I'm presenting a poster and short talk on my karri forest fire research from last year, it'll be a great opportunity to network with other fire ecologists from elsewhere in Australia and the world.

- And one final thing: I've got some really, really exciting news that I'm not allowed to share yet, but stay tuned because I'm allowed to announce it in December...