After two days of trying to not fall asleep in Melbourne, I flew up to Brisbane, where I will be spending the next five weeks at the University of Queensland, St. Lucia. I'll be trying to meet (and get feed back from) a variety of researchers up here. There are so many acronyms associated with this one academic department, I feel like I'm in the US gov't!
EDG - Environmental Decisions Group
CSIRO - Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
NERP - National Environmental Research Program
ARC - Autralian Research Council
CEED - Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decision Making
GCI - Global Change Institute
... to name a few. And there's surely more I'm missing.
I've gotten a chance to meet with Hugh Possingham yesterday (For those of you not in my field reading this, he's kind of a big deal in conservation biology, particularly systematic conservation planning and decision science). I'm hoping to go out birding with him at some point in the coming weeks. He's does monthly surveys in some locations around here, and has already told me the best place to find a bowerbird within driving distance of Brisie (another slang name for Brisbane)! Heck yes!
I also gave a talk at the departmental morning tea today. There are lots of marine/reef people studying here, so hopefully a few of them know who I am now, and I'll be able to get some feed back on the MPA project I'm doing here.
On a side note, we should have tea and scones in TN once a week! I suppose our equivalent in 2 dollar tuesdays at Sunspot, but tea and scones is so much less committal and more inclusive.
Australian vocab:
"room to swing a cat": refers to amount of space in a particular location/venue. (ex: "Wow there's a lot of people in this pictionary game. There's not enough room to swing a cat in here"). Apparently has actually been tried by at least one native Victorian, resulting in devastating outcomes for the cat.
capsicum: pepper
muesli: granola, or pretty much
flat white: espresso with a ton of milk in it, but not a latte, cause that's also on the menu
brekkie/brekky: breakfast
paw paw: papaya... that one confused me
mangosteen: mangosteen (yea, ok, it's the same, but it's still the first time I've eaten one!)
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