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Eureka accolade for Associate Professor Kris French (foregroun...
Eureka accolade for Associate Professor Kris French (foreground) and her PhD student Holly Parsons
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Eureka success for Birds in Backyards
20 Aug 2008 | Bernie Goldie
While the votes fell short for Professor Mark Walker to take out the Eureka Prize People’s Choice Award last night – UOW did enjoy a Eureka success as part of a team in the Environmental Sustainability Education category.
The Birds in Backyards Program came up trumps for the Australian Museum and Birds Australia team which includes Associate Professor Kris French and her PhD student, Holly Parsons, from the School of Biological Sciences.
Professor Walker had been vying for an individual Eureka award based on his research into the flesh eating bacterium known as Streptococcus pyogenes which is a serious disease-causing microbe affecting the northern Australian Aboriginal population.
The People’s Choice Award went to PhD student Nicole Kuepper, a solar cell scientist from the University of New South Wales. Almost 16,000 people from across Australia cast their vote and chose Nicole as the winner of this category. She is working on developing and patenting a revolutionary solar cell that can be manufactured at low temperatures using everyday items like a pizza oven, nail polish and an inkjet printer.
Birds in Backyards is a research, education and conservation program focusing on the birds that live where people live.
Professor French said it was a fabulous result for the team which had been a finalist last year as well.
In Australia, more than 20 per cent of bird species are under threat of extinction compared to 10 per cent elsewhere in the world.
And last night at the awards ceremony in Sydney, the team’s website enlisting backyard bird enthusiasts to combat this decline won the $10,000 NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change Allen Strom Eureka Prize for Environmental Sustainability Education.
With more than 500 pages, the website contains encyclopaedic coverage of Australian birds.
The site assists anyone with a garden to become a conservation activist by creating habitat for wildlife.
As part of the interactive site, visitors are encouraged to answer surveys about local bird surveys. The army of ‘backyarders’ has completed more than 12,000 surveys totalling nearly 75,000 species records – valuable scientific data gathered entirely through community participation.
Chair of the Birds in Backyards Steering Committee is Kate Ravich whose love and passion for birds and the natural world led her to become actively involved with conservation at an early age. Other members are Dr Richard Major, a research scientist at the Australian Museum; Judy Christie from the Sydney Metropolitan Catchment Management Authority; Judy Harrington, an Environmental Ranger from the Visitor Programs and Services section at Sydney Olympic Park; Wojciech Dabrowk, from Bird Explorers – an initiative dedicated to bird photography and promotion of wildlife conservation; and Dr Charlotte Taylor who is a senior lecturer in Biological Sciences and Associate Dean for Learning and Teaching in the Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney.
Professor French is also a member of the Steering Committee with some of her research focusing on understanding the declines in birds in cities.
She has supervised several students in research projects supported by the Birds in Backyards program including PhD student Holly Parsons who is now the National Program manager involved in developing Birds in Backyards into a national project.
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