Hey look! I'm on a website! My project still isn't on the main site, but that's because I haven't officially proposed it yet. I still have to do a proposal seminar (a 20 minute lecture and Q&A session with anyone from the university - but mostly professors, staff and other postgrad students from my school, since we're all obligated to go to them). And after that it has to go through ethics approval and get a stamp of approval from the graduate school. In our school we get two people to review the seminar and provide feedback (on top of my two supervisors who are providing feedback), so normally that's pretty quick for us, since it's technically already been through at least 4 researchers and been revised a few times. The ethics part is easy for me, because I'm not using humans or animals and just fill in a declaration that I promise that I won't and that's about it. Which is good. For animals/humans it can take months to get approval, because it goes to a committee, but the committee can only make decisions when every person is present (which isn't always). It's the same at home...at least from what I've heard/seen...I guess it could be faster in some places too. Now you know why I decided to study plants, water and soil!
The bushfires have stopped for the time being. Mostly because of the huge rainfall we've been getting. Apparently this will be an above average year, which is good because this first year of my project relies on some decent rain, which isn't always guaranteed in a drought-prone area. Of course high rainfall now can mean either: (1) it will, in fact, be above average this year, or (2) it's going to get really dry soon. So I'm hoping for option (1). Most of the fires right now are actually prescribed, and they are carefully monitored and put out at the right time. In WA they manage bushfires, but realized a while back that most of the plant species (a tonne of the larger trees, plus a lot of the plants you've seen in my pictures, like the little tropical-looking "bush" in my previous entry) all require fire for either deciding they should release seeds, or for seeds to open, etc. A lot of plants here adapted to fire, because it was a common part of the landscape, and now they wait until the heat from fire is present before releasing seeds (a lot of evidence says that there are way more nutrients for plants after fire!). So now they intentionally burn areas of forest each year along the ground and make sure it won't spread, because otherwise a lot of plants wouldn't reproduce. The closest intentional burn recently was about 1 km away, but on the other side of a lake. The pictures looked overly blurry, so I didn't bother keeping them, but it's impressive to see!
Anyways...it reminds me of Florida. It's like a torrential downpour for 15-30 minutes, and then perfectly sunny. Although, unlike Florida, this repeats every couple of hours hahaha.
The bushfires have stopped for the time being. Mostly because of the huge rainfall we've been getting. Apparently this will be an above average year, which is good because this first year of my project relies on some decent rain, which isn't always guaranteed in a drought-prone area. Of course high rainfall now can mean either: (1) it will, in fact, be above average this year, or (2) it's going to get really dry soon. So I'm hoping for option (1). Most of the fires right now are actually prescribed, and they are carefully monitored and put out at the right time. In WA they manage bushfires, but realized a while back that most of the plant species (a tonne of the larger trees, plus a lot of the plants you've seen in my pictures, like the little tropical-looking "bush" in my previous entry) all require fire for either deciding they should release seeds, or for seeds to open, etc. A lot of plants here adapted to fire, because it was a common part of the landscape, and now they wait until the heat from fire is present before releasing seeds (a lot of evidence says that there are way more nutrients for plants after fire!). So now they intentionally burn areas of forest each year along the ground and make sure it won't spread, because otherwise a lot of plants wouldn't reproduce. The closest intentional burn recently was about 1 km away, but on the other side of a lake. The pictures looked overly blurry, so I didn't bother keeping them, but it's impressive to see!
Anyways...it reminds me of Florida. It's like a torrential downpour for 15-30 minutes, and then perfectly sunny. Although, unlike Florida, this repeats every couple of hours hahaha.
I know of a William Sawyer, but I don't know who this Ryan character is...
I heard about that guy once. Trying to still my identity......