March Phytogen 2021

26 March 2021

Welcome to Phytogen for March 2021.

On the Wednesday 17th March 2021, Australia’s chief scientist Dr Cathy Foley spoke at the National Press Club. If you haven’t watched this yet, I hope you can find time this weekend or over the Easter break. You can watch on:

The title of the talk was “What next for science and research in Australia?”

Here is an article by the ASPS Environmental and Ecophysiology: Global Change Representative Dr Georgia Koerber from the University of Adelaide. email: georgia.koerber@adelaide.edu.au

Last year, I decided to upskill. I have always been alright at statistics therefore I went for an online Masters in Data Science. This nice article by open universities describes up-skilling well. At the beginning of 2021, many universities are having increased demand for postgraduate courses such as 6 to 12 month certificates and masters offered online. There were government initiatives too for subsidised university courses so that we could upskill while working from our homes last year.

Even though, I don’t think I had many more hours, I did feel niggling to attempt to get ahead of the curve as described in this Conversation article: What should we do with 1 billion hours of time? Australian’s COVID-19 opportunity.

Below are slides from my presentation (online of course :)) of my python project. I had taken photos of the tree canopies from 2013 to 2019 and calculated the leaf area index (LAI). I aimed to explore if LAI related to normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI), enhanced vegetation index (EVI) calculated from satellite data I downloaded, and how much carbon dioxide the mallee forest was storing as carbon, the net ecosystem production (NEP) recorded by the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) Calperum tower during the same time period. In the future, and probably not too much distant into the future; it will be much more powerful to monitor how forest canopies are tracking with NEP than having to carry out laborious field measurements and calculations of leaf area index. Later this year will be my next subject in python and I look forward to adding in data from other sites around Australia and maybe even sites from other countries.

Having a look online, there are also plenty of great opportunities to upskill in plant science, such as those written about in this article: Agriculture degrees are having their moment in the sun. The FAO is concerned about food demand in the future, which means those in the agriculture sector have a pivotal role to play in the production of food (FAO, 2017).

Reference: FAO. 2017. The future of food and agriculture – Trends and challenges. Rome. http://www.fao.org/3/i6583e/i6583e.pdf

Events

This weekend is Earth Hour.

Science week is 14th – 22nd August 2021. ASPS have been awarded funding to run events.

Please also remember to encourage your colleagues and students to apply for ASPS society awards:

ASPS Education and Outreach Award

Applications for the ASPS Education and Outreach Award should be lodged with the Honorary Secretary, ASPS Inc. secretary@asps.org.au Applications for the 2021 ASPS Education and Outreach Award are now open. The closing date for the 2021 award is April 16th 2021.

RN Robertson Travelling Fellowship

Up to $4000 is available to award in 2021 to support domestic or international travel for an early career researcher to undertake a research visit outside their host institution. More than one award can be made if the total requested funds are less than $4000.

Applications for the R.N. Robertson Travelling Fellowship should be forwarded in electronic form to the Hon Secretary of ASPS (secretary@asps.org.au). Applications for the 2021 Fellowship are now open. The closing date is 16th April 2021. To be eligible for this fellowship round some fraction of the planned work must take place in 2021.

Please also make sure your ASPS membership is up to date and encourage your colleagues and students to join ASPS. Remember to tweet to @asps_ozplants if you have news and have upcoming events.