​Lauren’s research project, supervised by Dr. April Reside, Dr. Annabel Smith and Dr. Lee McMichael, seeks to identify critical winter foraging habitat for the Grey-headed flying fox in the Toowoomba local government area, with the goal of informing future conservation policy and planning. The project will also examine the diet of Grey-headed flying fox within the Toowoomba region and how both diet and roost occupancy change over time in response to environmental variables. Using a six-year dataset from the National Flying Fox Monitoring Program, Lauren will create spatially and temporally explicit models to investigate if weather patterns can be used to predict flying fox roost occupation across Queensland. By examining the relationship between roost occupancy, antecedent rainfall and temperature, Lauren hopes to determine if weather patterns can be used to forecast mass movement of grey-headed flying foxes.  Lauren completed a Bachelor of Environmental Science and Management, majoring in Ecology and Conservation, through Charles Sturt University in 2021. Through her undergraduate studies, Lauren developed an interest in how threatened species recovery could be better integrated into policy and planning frameworks to provide stronger protection of habitat which is essential to threatened species conservation.

 

Favourite animal: The Grey-headed flying fox of course!

Controversial opinion: Weet-Bix should be eaten with vegemite, not milk.