School for Field Studies
SFS programs allow students to gain research experience
in the field; their research centers in Australia, Baja, Costa Rica,
Kenya, and Turks & Caicos provide a different research focus in each
country. Visit our website at http://www.fieldstudies.org
Australia – Tropical Rain Forest Studies-Heather Moe in her 3rd. year Biology
The Australia program is about rain forest management. A
great deal of their forest has been carved into fragments by agriculture
and they are trying to reconnect the patches through riparian corridors
(thinish strips of forest that follow the creaks and rivers). We
learned about the different forest types and then visited different
places ranging from original patches of forests to forests that are for
logging to farms with corridors already constructed to state research
sites.
One of the major portions of the class was working on a
research project. Each faculty member there has a different research
interest and you pick a project to work on while there. We work on a
small section of the research in groups that then fit into the bigger
research of the professor’s research. The three projects going on while I
was there was on bird migrations, economic planning of corridors on a
local farm and the effects of Cyclone Larry on the forests. I worked on
the last project and we continued the research done by the previous
semester students. When we finished collecting data each student was
able to write a research paper like what would be submitted to a
journal.
Some other things we did while there was to learn to identify
birds and trees. We visited town shires to learn how their government
gets involved in rebuilding the forests. We talked with Aboriginal
people to get their views on how things have changed since Captain Cook
came. We had Sundays off and did a variety of things on those days
including going to the Great Barrier Reef, visiting local water falls
and making didjeridoos (A musical instrument of the Aboriginal peoples
of Australia, consisting of a long hollow branch or stick that makes a
deep drone when blown into)
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