A piece in The Conversation about aSCR

This piece gives a non-technical overview of why aSCR is such a useful method.

End of year Lab braai

After the extreme nature of the Mannequin Challenge, we all found time to relax at Ana's place for a braai. 

Thanks everyone for making it such a fantastic year!

Counting chirps - paper appears in Journal of Applied Ecology

At long last, the paper outlining a practical example of aSCR is available in Journal of Applied Ecology. The paper uses data from the Honours project of Tanya Scott who used 3 arrays of 6 microphones each over an entire season of calling of Arthroleptella lightfooti in Silvermine on the Cape peninsula. Tanya's data was re-analysed using Ben Stevenson's methods of aSCR and written up to show how the technique can be used in practice to monitor a species in an applied setting.

One unexpected result was that the estimate of effective survey area showed that this changed quite dramatically between occassions. This is important as most techniques which use microphones are not aware that such fluctuations may occur and so many monitoring programs may have uncontrolled bias.

Read another blog on this article here.

Corey wins first prize

Well done, Corey! First prize in the Department of Botany & Zoology's Annual Research Meeting, for the best MSc talk. Corey outlined his experiment in conservation of Xenopus gilli   by determining the predation rate from sympatric X. laevis. 

...and he looks really happy. 

In a sneaky moment, while everyone was waiting for the photographer, I popped this image of the deparment.