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We had four US college students here, carrying out their one month Independent Study component at the Station, as part of their School for International Training course work in Cairns. The students were junior and senior level University students who were undertaking an Australian based one-semester course for credit at their home Universities. To-date, we have hosted 10 of these students - doing intensive research on subjects as diverse as fig pollination to flying fox management.
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| Franny Elson, Suzanne Matwyshen, Lisa Kenney and Holger Anlauf with a new section of walkway to the swimming hole.
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Jamie Conklin (University of Vermont) recorded the activities of non-pollinating parasitoid wasps (Sycophaginidae) on Ficus congesta, a common small cauliflorous fig tree of rainforest margins.
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Franny Elson (University of Michigan) researching the ability of different pioneer rainforest trees commonly planted in regeneration areas in far-north Queensland to recruit other tree species, through attracting birds and fruit bats to them.
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Suzanne Matwyshen (George Washington University) watching the pollinators of a common littoral rainforest shrub, Scaevola taccada, do their thing.
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Lisa Kenny (Loyola College) observing the damage that spectacled flying foxes do to exotic fruit crops such as rambutans and leeches, and assisted in the development of a technique for assessing this damage.
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We're not bound to the terrestrial world! Here SIT student Kara Johanson (Michigan) emerges after trying to assess the biodiversity of the fringing reef off Cape Tribulation. These reefs offer an amazing array of invertebrates immediately off the coast, but the water is often turbid, making such studies sometimes difficult.
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| Simon Grove, PhD student at the Cooperative Research Center for Tropical Rainforest Ecology and Management based in Cairns, worked on the differences in diversity of insects in logged and un-logged forest. He carried out his PhD research in the Daintree region, and when in the field was based at the Research Station. Simon was a Station Scholar and the Austrop Foundation covered most of his costs of staying at the Station. Pictured here with his wife Chris at the Christmas Party.
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