We’ve been here at the Ecological Society of Australia 2008 conference here in Sydney for three days now, manning the stand we’ve got here and trying to get to a few talks.

Generally, this conference is all about research.  I have to admit, some of it is over my head.  There’s a really broad range of talks in some of the sessions – especially the speed talks, like the one I gave on Tuesday afternoon.  I’ve just uploaded my talk to our web site as a PDF file (367kb).  Basically it was a cut-down of the talk I gave at the ECA in October (see the blog post here for details of that one).  The talk had to be done in four minutes, so my main aim with it was to come up with some thoughts for the audience about where technology might be used in ecology in the next few years.

We managed to have yesterday morning off to see a bit more of Sydney before catching up with the guys at the Australian Museum.  We managed to get a coffee down at Circular Quay, and then a quick trip up the Centrepoint tower.  Each night we’ve also tried to go out somewhere different a see a bit more around the traps – no point in coming this far and not getting a bit of time to see the local area.

I’ve got a few bird records that I’ve been logging in Earth 2.0 while we’ve been here.  We’re (and by that I mean Tim) currently in the process of migrating data between the old Digital Bird Database and the newer Earth 2.0 system.  It’s a good opportunity to review how I do my bird surveys and how the data should be structured.  Not that I’ve actually had lots of time to review that since coming over here!

Anyway, the ESA conference has been good for us to come to.  I’m looking forward to seeing a few of the talks tomorrow, especially the keynote speakers.

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