Last week was a big week for UNE’s Aquatic Ecology Lab.

Dr Sarah Mika, the lab lead, gave the 2024 Christy Fellows Lecture at the 2024 conference of the Australian Freshwater Sciences Society (AFSS) at Albury on Thursday. This invited plenary lecture recognises Sarah’s 2023 Early Career Excellence Award by the Australian Freshwater Sciences Society. Sarah spoke about her experience running two long-term programs monitoring catchment-scale patterns and process to guide management priorities: Ecohealth focuses on aquatic ecosystem health in the Northern Rivers and Northern Tablelands of NSW, and Flow-MER examines the ecological outcomes of Commonwealth water for the environment in the Warrego-Darling and Gwydir catchments. Her reflection on the need for good values-based leadership to ensure the success of collaborative interdisciplinary research resonated strongly with the audience. Sarah was also elected as Vice-President of AFSS.

Next, Dr Manisha Shakya, a post-doc with the Aquatic Lab, was awarded a 2024 UNE Internal Funding Scheme (IFS) grant “Impact of arsenic and antimony on macroinvertebrate communities and their Biomolecular Composition in a Freshwater Ecosystem” for her work in the Macleay River. Manisha is an ecotoxicologist with the Aquatic Lab and her expertise is in the impacts of heavy metal contamination on aquatic foodwebs. Manisha is looking forward to continuing her collaboration with UNE’s Pollution Science Research Group with this research grant.

And then on Friday, Rachel Greene was awarded her Master of Science degree for her thesis “Challenging the applicability of current river restoration techniques given boundary conditions of the Anthropocene”, supervised by Associate Professor Brad Evans and Dr Sarah Mika. Rachel studied the last 50 years’ of river works in the Namoi and Gwydir catchments and her research helps to improve river restoration in Australia and globally by showing how better to work with rivers’ natural processes.