An invitation to participate in a photographic workshop in Glenlyon

Bats, bees, birds, butterflies, insects, moths, and wind each assist plants with the pollination process using unique, highly specialized and diverse methods. To date, no study has been conducted on pollinators in the Upper Campaspe Catchment – and that is where you come in!

We would like to encourage you, the Upper Campaspe Catchment community, to record, photograph and report on the many specialised native plant-pollinator relationships that you observe in your area.

We would love you to join our team of Citizen Scientists creating a data base of indigenous pollinators in the Upper Campaspe catchment!

As part of our Pollinator Project, we are inviting you to spend the weekend with the UCLN in Glenlyon on 8 & 9 October from 1pm to 4pm, and learn how to ‘photograph’ native insects from our resident pollinator photographer – UCLN President John Walter.

The Pollinators in Focus workshop will be run in two parts over two days – Saturday 8th will be theory based at the Glenlyon Town Hall, while Sunday 9th will be a practical run in a local private garden!

Please email ucln@uppercampaspelandcare.org or call UCLN Landcare Facilitator, Rebekah on 0432 491 789 to reserve your place!

For more images of your local pollinators or to share images you have taken, please visit our iNaturalistAU Projects:

UCLN Pollinator Hunters

or

UCLN Pollinators of Central Victoria

Join Pollinator Ecologist, Dr Amy-Marie Gilpin, Research Fellow at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, ONLINE at 7pm on Thursday 8th September as she talks us through the present and future impacts of climate change on our native pollinators.

Tickets are available via EVENTBRITE or you can join us directly by clicking the following ZOOM link.

DR AMY-MARIE GILPIN

The following is taken from Dr Amy-Marie Gilpin’s website

I am particularly interested in the ecology of pollinators and the pollination function they provide both within agricultural and native ecosystems. My research to date has largely focused on identifying the pollinators of agriculturally important crops within both temperate and tropical regions of Australia and the floral resources that support healthy pollinator populations within agroecosystems. I employ a variety of methods from multiple disciplines including large-scale manipulative field and glasshouse experiments to determine the effects of climate change on floral resources and pollinators. I use an integrative approach to understand firstly who are the pollinators and then what is there effect on surrounding plants, ecosystems, plant mating systems, seed fitness as well as fruit quality and yield.

ABOUT THIS EVENT

This event is funded by the NRM Drought Resilience Program – Grants. The grants support projects that contribute to improved drought resilience of agricultural landscapes through experimentation in NRM practices, systems and approaches that go beyond current best practice.

This event forms part of the Upper Campaspe Landcare Network’s NRM Drought Resilience Grant project – Empowering an informed and engaged community to allow for the creation of connecting pollinator corridors through the Upper Campaspe Catchment to ensure environmental resilience and improved functionality of drought threatened agricultural landscapes.

A free webinar with Dr Martino Malerba on Managing farm dams to reduce carbon emissions while improving biodiversity and water security

About this event

Farm dams are the most abundant type of freshwater wetland in Australia. Farm dams are also among the highest greenhouse gas emitters of all freshwater ecosystems, producing the equivalent of 385,000 cars each day in Victoria alone.

In this 1 hour webinar presentation, Dr Martino Malerba, a senior environmental scientist at Deakin Uni.’s Blue Carbon Lab, will discuss how farms can be managed to reduce carbon emissions whilst improving biodiversity and water security – follow this link to reserve your place EVENTBRITE.

Dr Malerba manages the Teal Carbon group at Deakin Uni.’s Blue Carbon Lab, which focuses on the sustainable management of freshwater systems and leads an interdisciplinary research team to quantify the scale of these emissions, explore strategies for greener practices, and develop financial mechanisms for better management. His research group collaborates with CSIRO to develop hydrological modelling, with the National Carbon Inventory team to quantify carbon emissions from freshwater systems, and with the Clean Energy Regulator to develop new methodologies to award carbon credits for farm dam management.

This year Dr Malerba was awarded a DECRA Fellowship by the Australian Research Council to expand his research on farm dam emissions.

This webinar is made possible with funding through the Australian Government’s Future Drought Fund Natural Resource Management Drought Resilience Program which is supporting ACT NRM to work with land managers to improve the drought resilience of water resources on rural lands across the ACT.

About Martino

Martino leads the Teal Carbon group at Deakin’s Blue Carbon Lab. He is an environmental scientist, ecologist, and evolutionary biologist whose research focuses on freshwater wetlands.

Equivalent to coastal wetlands, teal carbon ecosystems are key to regulating greenhouse gases and mitigating the effects of climate change. However, their degradation due to land-use change, pollution, water extraction, and landscape modification can release large amounts of carbon back into the atmosphere.

For example, farm dams are among the highest greenhouse gas emitters of all freshwater ecosystems. Yet, simple management interventions (such as using fences to exclude livestock) can change these systems from a source of pollution (carbon sources) to becoming part of the solution (carbon sinks).

Dr Malerba’s research team works to quantify carbon emissions, restores degraded sites, explores strategies for greener practices, identifies social drivers of sustainable development, and explores financial mechanisms for better management of freshwater resources.

His research is supported by the Australian Research Council through a DECRA Fellowship. He collaborates with the Australian National Carbon Inventory team to improve our estimates of carbon emissions from freshwater systems, and with the Clean Energy Regulator to develop new methodologies for financial incentives (carbon credits).

Extract from the Blue Carbon Lab Website