7th one-day postgraduate course on Current Ecology and Evolution

Sunday Nov 30th 2008, in Sydney

To participants who are registering or have registered: Welcome! Thanks very much for your interest. We look forward to meeting you all in Sydney.

Please, we would like you to write some brief comments. What we would like you to do is nominate a research paper that you find particularly interesting. Email to vegadmin@bio.mq.edu.au. We suggest you arrange a round-table discussion about this in your lab. Maybe the paper will be one that came out recently. Maybe it will be an older paper that you met during undergrad or honours. Maybe it inspired you and affected your research direction. Please explain briefly (couple of paras) what it is about the paper that has led you to nominate it. 

This nominated paper and explanation will be your contribution to the day, along with your contributions to focus groups and other discussions. Please, we need responses by October 17th at latest. Why not do it now, immediately?

Two participants may be invited from among these submissions to give a 10-minute presentation. It will not be compulsory, and if invited you will get at least a month’s notice. The organizers may give a short presentation summarizing what kinds of research papers you nominated. The papers would be considered as a group, not attributed to individuals.

Thanks! That’s all we need from you beforehand. Now here is some information about issues that the focus groups will be discussing on the day. We invite you to think about them beforehand and organize discussions about them in your lab group.

Topic A: What advice would you give to someone who is contemplating a PhD? What criteria should they use in choosing a topic, or a university, or a supervisor? The list of criteria that you compile may grow quite long, but try especially to identify the 1-2 most important items, and to give advice as concrete and as helpful as possible about those.

Topic B: Suppose some visionary future government were to decide to allocate one-third of the land area of Australia, in a single contiguous block, to become a "wild" ecosystem (i.e. no extractive economic activity). You are on the Board responsible for managing it. Discuss whether the aim should be (a) to approximate the ecosystem of 250 years BP as closely as possible (b) to approximate the ecosystem of 250,000 years BP as closely as possible (c) to sequester as much carbon from the atmosphere as possible (d) to conserve as many highly endangered species as possible, from any part of the world whatsoever (e) some other objective that you may wish to propose. For extra kudos, you may also provide a map showing which one-third of Australia's surface should be designated in this way, and why.