Greetings From Down Under!

Location:
Sydney, Australia
Latitude/Longitude:
-33.868819700000, 151.209295500000
Journal Entry:

G’day, mate! My name is Camille, and I’ll be taking you along with me on my adventures in Australia. As I write my first article, I’m seated on the train and headed home from my university. This gorgeous campus, surrounded by trees, is located at the far western edge of Sydney. It takes about fifty minutes to get home on the train, but I don’t mind the commute. While riding on the train, I can look out the window and watch the scenery transform from a mixture of forests and farmland into the skyscrapers and city lights near my apartment.

I arrived in this beautiful country in August to conduct research in plant ecology. Plant ecology is the science of how plants like trees and grasses interact with each other and their surrounding environment. I’m especially interested in understanding how a plant’s design impacts its function and how plants deal with stressful events like wildfires (or as they say in Australia, ‘bushfires’) and droughts. There are plant ecologists working all over the world, but Australia is an especially fascinating place to be. The types of plants that grow here are very different from the ones in the United States, where I grew up. At the same time, Australia has recently dealt with many intense weather events like fires and heatwaves.

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