Crowd funding and conservation: Bobtails and dugites in the suburbs

Getting funding for conservation research is always a struggle, unless you happen to have an oil well or a gold mine in your back yard.  Competitive grants are by the very nature rather competitive with Australian Research Council grants having a less than 20% success rate and the majority of them go to people with vast track records and publication lists as long as your arm (or your very long beard).  So where do you go to try and find the money for your research when you are just starting out?

A bit of my history

So how do you end up with a job that primarily entails chasing furry animals around in the bush (there’s actually a lot more boring things to what I do mind you)?

For me it comprised of about 9 years of studying and some blessed circumstances.

Undergrad

To start with I completed a Bachelor of Science in Animal Science with honours at UWA.  As of the end of this year that degree will, sadly, no longer exist as UWA makes the transition to a new set of course structures.  This included an honours thesis on the “Age structure, sex ratios and fluctuating asymmetry of tammar wallabies (Macropus eugenii) killed on the roads of Garden Island.  <sarcasm>It’s a really great read if you’ve got a few hours and not much to do</sarcasm>.

Postgrad

After completing my honours and spending a year working part time at the uni milking sheep and part-time working for a cosmetic surgery clinic doing hair transplants (and no that’s not a joke), I managed to secure a PhD stipend and went back to studying full-time.

I was lucky enough to have some generous support from the Department of Defence to continue to research that I began in my honours to look at the impact of road-kills and disturbance as a whole on the ecology of tammar wallabies on Garden Island.  So I spent the best part of four years doing fieldwork, trapping, radio tracking, pulling road-killed wallabies out of the freezer and recording things about them in order to determine just what impact the presence of the navy was having on these unique animals and how we could best manage them.

To summarise the results of those four years of my life: when you give wallabies lots more grass to eat they get fatter and raise more offspring, but then 1 in 3 of those offspring get run-over before they reach their second birthday.  All in all the combination of more grass and road-kills was resulting in a fairly stable population.  The flip side of that is that fixing the road-kill problem would likely result in an explosion in wallaby numbers which would then create a new set of more difficult to solve issues.

If you are keen to learn more and get into the details of what I did and what I found (there is a bit more too it than a 1 paragraph summary) then you can access a digital copy of my thesis from the UWA Online Thesis Repository.  I have also published some of the results from my thesis in a paper in the journal Wildlife Research.  If you would like a copy of that paper please get in touch via email and I can supply you with one.  I have another paper currently in review from my thesis which will hopefully be published soon.

Getting a (semi) real job

When I eventually finished and submitted my PhD thesis in October 2008 I faced the dilemma that any long-term student faces, the need to get a proper job.  Luckily I had a generous supervisor who offered my a position as a research associate to write a monitoring plan for the population of tammar wallabies on Garden Island and to undertake the first annual monitoring.  I was also responsible for helping to put together an ARC linkage grant application with Main Roads WA to do the work that we are currently doing on fauna underpasses.  Our grant applications to the ARC were unsuccessful, but with the generous support of Main Roads WA we are able to undertake the research with ARC funds.  The end of my contract as a research associate coincided with a colleague having a baby and taking maternity leave and I was then offered a position as a lecturer to do her teaching while she was on leave.  At the end of that contract another colleague and one of my PhD supervisors retired and I was then asked to take over his teaching which I have been doing since.  It definitely pays to be in the right place at the right time.

So that’s how I got to be where I am.