Sustainability in Melbourne

I was very impressed with Melbourne’s sustainability efforts. They had every mode of public transportation that you could think of including tram, bus, and light rail. You could purchase a Myki card at any 7-11 store and just swipe it when you go on. This is a picture is the tram infront of the Pensione hotel where many of the conference delegates stayed.  My hotel was in the Holiday Inn which was just around the corner to the left.

 

Melbourne has the Yarra River running straight through the center of the city and have installed a debris catchment device to help reduce pollution in the water. I thought this was a nice design.

 

 They have a public bicycle rental program that seemed to be just $2.50 an hour. I saw two of these stations just in my short walks.

 

 

 

Australia has a large timber industry and with the fast growing trees, they reach maturation fairly quickly. We saw a couple of logging trucks coming out of the forest during our mid-conference tour drive. I think that they mainly use Eucalyptus for pulp and they have planted Pinus radiate as a main timber species. I have encountered this introduced pine in plantations in Tasmania, mainland Australia, and New Zealand. It seems fairly well adapted to the climates around here and is used extensively as a timber species. It is a bit odd to see this pine planted across the landscape and local environmentalists take issues with its widespread use.

They had public artwork around every corner. They also have public pianos out on the streets for anyone to come and play. I saw at least five of these pianos during my walks on the waterfront and was wondering how they keep them all tuned.  Luckily, I got to see one of them being tuned in front of the National Gallery of Victoria (the state where Melbourne is located). 

  

 

We closed our last night at the conference at a “bar” called the Testing Grounds. This reminded me of brownfield redevelopment in cities, but it is actually an older historic site that the arts community maintains to develop a fund for new artists. It was a very interesting place with wood pallets for furniture and container crates for the bar and artist in residence space.

 

Moon Rise over the Yarra River

WorldDendro Conference in Melbourne

The 9th WorldDendro conference convened from January 13-17th in the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. This building was completed in 2009 at the cost of $1 billion dollars. It has a six star Green Star environmental rating which is the highest possible rating form the Green Building Council for Australia and this is the only convention center in Australia with this rating. It is a very nice building and with our 300 participants, we only take up a small part of the building. We had participants from 38 different countries.  It is always interesting to hear about the latest developments in dendrochronology and to meet back up with friends from around the world.  I think that I knew 40-50% of the people at the conference from previous fieldweeks and conferences.  We also noticed that the fieldweeks prior to the conference develop a pretty strong cohort of people.  Looking around the audience during the plenary sessions you could see clumps of fieldweek participants sitting together. 

Melbourne city was beautiful. There was some nice older architecture, public transportation (in every picture I took), some really interesting small alleys with cafes in the road and graffiti on the walls.

There were many excellent presentations during the conference. A few stood out to be very interesting to me.  We actually had a sociologist named Meritxell Ramirez-Olle who was studying Rob Wilson from St. Andrews University in Scotland. She was examining how dendrochronologists conduct their research, interact with students, and develop their ideas. Another presentation examined the effect of sampling design on climate response, climate reconstruction, and biomass calculation. David Frank and others had completed a 100% sample of a half hectare plot. Then they subsampled their data based on targeted sampling, different area plot sampling, and random sampling. They found some bias in response from targeted sampling in biomass calculation, but not in climate response. There is much work on blue light reflectance as a potential replacement for density. We had a whole plenary session on the status of the divergence issue. It seems that researchers have started to get their arms around that problem.  David Frank gave another very good presentation documenting about ten different processes that people have called divergence.  Some of it seems to have been controlled by standardization procedures and other times it seems to be a true switching of limiting factors that cause a departure from temperature response. The research community is narrowing down the geographic areas that are currently experiencing divergence and creating more refined definitions of the phenomena. We had a good session on insect outbreak dynamics and climate effects and response.  We ended with a 45 minute discussion about how best to build to meta datasets of insect outbreak studies so that we could study them across their entire range and start to analyze responses to climate and potential effects on climate reconstruction. The next steps are probably to pursue grants to build a databank of insect outbreak records similar to the International Multi Proxy Databank which keeps fire history and charcoal data.

I had the opportunity to meet with most of the people that I plan to visit in Europe during the latter part of my sabbatical, so I have started that planning in earnest.

We had a heat wave that exactly coincided with the conference which probably assured that the sessions were well attended.  The picture is a snapshot of my phone when we stepped out of the conference center at 6pm. 108 degrees at 6pm that day.  We had a number of days that were above 110 and five days in a row that were above 100.  I am told this is a record for Melbourne and they have not seen anything like it for 60-100 years. Our last evening of the conference, we got to experience the weather change with strong winds, a bit of rain, and a 20 degree temperature drop in about half an hour. That was an interesting experience and apparently not uncommon in Melbourne.
We took a mid-conference tour to the central highlands. We took four buses up the mountains and sadly our broke down. It seemed like it overheated because the driver was driving at about 5 miles per hour and turned off the air conditioning.  In the end, the 2 hour drive took us about 3.5 hours. But it was well worth the trip.
We got to observe some of Australia’s classic vineyards on our drive out to the highlands. We experienced a Eucalyptus forest where trees have grown to about 100 feet tall in 70 years. These trees can grow up to 1 meter (3 feet) in height each year and are very productive.
In 2009, a severe bush fire destroyed the town of Marysville and at the top of the mountain at Lake Mountain Ski Resort, a fire burned through and killed all of the snow gums.

I was able to get a picture of Tom Swetnam and Malcolm Hughes conversing at the Lake Mountain Ski Resort Café. This picture reminded me of when they both came out to help with my fieldwork on my masters in 1996. I think that picture was of them taking a nap on picnic tables after a particularly long and hot field day.

 

I had the opportunity to visit the Melbourne Aquarium with Michelle Ho and Carolyn Copenheaver my first night in the city directly after traveling from the fieldweek in Tasmania.  The Aquarium was amazing with a massive salt water tank where you could walk through tunnels to observe the sharks, rays, and some really big fish.

  

 

 

 

Melbourne at night facing the conference center on the left of the image.

Fieldweek in Tasmania

I travelled to Tasmania from January 3rd through 12th for the WorldDendro Conference Fieldweek. There were 32 participants, 15 group leaders and organizers, six grade school students (mostly high school), and one high school teacher.

The participants for the fieldweek were mostly graduate students and came from all over the world including Australia, Belgium, Brazil, China, USA, Finland, Germany, Russia, and Zambia. The fieldweek was organized much like the North American Dendroecological Fieldweek which I have organized for the past 11 years. The participants split into six research groups and conducted original research from start to finish in a seven day period. The groups included climate response, stand-age structure (also called dendroecology which I lead), dendrometer bands to measure short term (every 15 minutes) stem growth in the trees, and long-chronology development.

 

My group analyzed six tree species (which were all knew to me) and developed well-dated chronologies from two of them. The samples below are Mrtle (Nothofagus cuninghamii), Tea Tree (Leptospermum sp.) in the first row, King Billy Pine (Athrotaxis selaginoides), Celery Top Pine (Phyllocladus aspleniifolius) in the second row, and an understory shrub Tasmanian Waratah (Telopia truncata).

                                                                           

 

Tasmania is one of the few places in the world that legally grows poppies for medicinal purposes as the main ingredient in morphine.  This produced many beautiful white blooming fields across the country side like in the picture below.

 

We caravanned with three vehicle out to the field site (see the van in the picture below) and stopped in the town of Sheffield to get a few supplies on the way out to the field.

We spent the first day in the field.  The weather in Tasmania was quite variable and relatively cool since we were there in high summer. It was often windy and storm fronts travelled through in our first few days.  Of course the entire day that we were in the field rained constantly and our rain gear was totally soaked by the end of the day.  It is also hard to core trees and label straws to store the cores when it is pouring down rain.  We had three groups (Climate response, dendroecology, and dendrometer bands) to sample this field site so we had about 20 people at the site.  This was a wet bog site with what seemed to be sphagnum moss forest floor.

 

 

 

Besides the rain, we got to encounter terrestrial leaches (see the one that was attracted to the heat of my increment borer in the picture below).  By the end of the day, I found seven leaches (five of which had attached to be already).  Because they inject an anticoagulant, we had many people arrive back at the field station with blood soaked garments.

 

We also got to experience Jack Jumper Ants which some people have an allergic reaction to which could be fatal.  Luckily no on got bitten by the ants, although we saw three ant nests on our hike in to the site. Below is a nest on the left and a close-up of the ants on the right.  See their blond colored pincers that they use to bite. Apparently they are quite aggressive.

 Our lab space for the research was relatively small. We spent most of our time in the space below for breakfast, lunches, and lab work.  

 

Our group moved out to a pavilion to do most of our work.  This was nice because we got to spend the days outside working on the microscope and our computers. 

 

 

We had dinner at the restaurant that was at Gowrie Park.  This area is also set up for backpackers with cabins and for campers.  We took over the whole dormitory space, but there were still many campers at the site.  We completely filled the restaurant during our dinner hour, so we had dinner early at 6:30pm, so that their other customers could come in after that.

 

 

Tasmania was a very beautiful island with many endemic tree species that do not occur anywhere else.  The fieldweek was a great success and all of the groups presented their research on January 11th.  We ended with a large social event which included some dancing. It was nice to have all of this work done and we all prepared to fly off to Melbourne for the WorldDendro Conference.

Sabbatical Activity: Service, Publication, and Grant

I worked through much of the end of December to clear up a number of service commitments so that I would be clear of them for research work in 2014.  In the last two weeks of December, I wrote six letters of recommendation, reviewed two manuscripts, reviewed one grant proposal, declined to review two other grant proposals, and judged awards for an international conference.  A committee that I serve on also completed and submitted a report to the dean on how to increase grant activity in the College of Arts and Sciences.

While teaching at the fieldweek in Tasmania I received good and bad news on some professional activities.  We had a paper accepted to the American Journal of Botany. This work was examining the genetic diversity of beech clones in balds in the Great Smokey Mountains National Park. I provided tree ages for the beech trees that were sampled and the genetic analysis showed that older beech patches were clonal while recent recruits came from both sexual and asexual reproduction.

Six hours after receiving this good news, I heard from the National Science Foundation that our grant "Influence of Industry on the Environment along the Wabash River" was not funded.

Travel to Melbourne

I left for Melbourne Australia on New Year's Eve. I got to the airport around 4pm Phoenix time. The trip to Las Angeles happened without any excitement. Then things started to get interesting.  The flight to Fiji (my layover on the way to Australia) had technical difficulties.  After about an hour of delay and attempts to fix the plain, they announced that it would not be flying until the next morning at the earliest which would have put me in late for the fieldweek. I called Orbitz (where I got my original ticket) and waited in line with Fiji Airlines to see what they could do to get me to Melbourne.  In the end, they kindly transferred me over to Quantas Airline for a flight that night to Sydney then a connection to Melbourne.  As it turns out, I made it in to Melbourne 7 hours before my originally scheduled flight, but I missed a 13 hour layover in Fiji.  Hopefully I will be able to catch Fiji on the way home so that I can explore the island a little bit.


The Phoenix Airport was lacking in sustainable options, but they did have this very nice water bottle filler after security which I took advantage of.

The flight is fairly direct from Las Angeles to Australia. Fiji is a logical stop along the way, but without it, it is a 14 hour flight.  It really was not bad because it is dark most of the way.  I slept (on and off) for about nine hours and then worked on some papers for about five hours on my new Asus Tablet. Sadly, I missed New Year's Day. After I woke up, we had crossed the international dateline, so I adjusted my clock and it was already January 2nd. Melbourne is 16 hours ahead of Terre Haute.

The only kangaroos that I have seen so far are on the tail fins of the airplanes.  The kangaroo is the symbol for Quantas air.  The flight was good, although we had mild turbulence the entire way so it was a pretty bumpy ride.

At the Sydney airport, they have recycling pretty much like at home. Once I checked into the hostel (Urban Central) they had a lot of signs in the bathrooms about drought in Victoria and conserving water (especially in showers). 

Flying in to Sydney, it reminded me a lot of the Pacific Northwest (much like Seattle).  It was very lush green and integrated with the sea shore.  I had four hours at the airport, but did not get out and explore. Instead, I had some lunch and charged my many electronic devises from the long flight. When I was flying in to the city, I kept wondering if there was fog or smog over the city, then our first close up view of the land showed an extensive oil refinery. I also saw a second one right in with the city before we landed.  I think Sydney was covered in smog when we flew in.

The Melbourne area is much more like southern California. We are in peak summer here, so the grass is brown. Much of the area is grassland with occasional trees throughout the area.

Melbourne is a nice city.  They have many posters up announcing their awards for one of the best cities in the world.  Driving in, I found it to be fairly industrial. They do have a large permanent Fares Wheel, like the one in London.

Melbourne has developed their riverfront and this is where WorldDendro is going to take place.  I came down to explore a little bit so that I know my way around for the conference, and this is a beautiful setting.  I think that we will have a great conference in this venue.