Miriam Slodownik’s Expedition Across Eastern Australia’s Botanical Landscapes
I’ve just returned from an inspiring trip to eastern Australia, where I combined conference travel with exploring some of the country’s most remarkable forests. As someone who studies ancient plant ecosystems, visiting modern rainforests offers an important perspective to picture the long-vanished ecosystems of our past. Walking through the dense, humid forests of north-eastern Australia, filled with bunyas, cedars, figs and vines, gave me a fleeting sense of what Australia’s Antarctic rainforests may have felt like 53 million years ago and let me reflect on a key question at the centre of my MSCA project POLARIS.: what made polar rainforests so different under extreme seasonality and unusual light conditions near the south pole.
The conference itself, the Australasian Systematic Botany Society meeting, was another memorable part of the trip. This year featured a large palaeo-session and the first time our small palaeobotany chapter met formally as part of the society. This felt like a new beginning: a moment of recognition for our discipline and an opening of doors for new collaborations between botanists and palaeobotanists. I presented both my PhD research on Australian fossil floras and the Witness Tree Project, and it was wonderful to see strong interest from researchers across fields. The conference excursion to Dorrigo National Park, a vast and lush rainforest, gave me a chance to learn more about rainforest plants as we walked and learned from one another in the field.
My trip concluded at the Queensland Herbarium, where I met with researchers, gave a seminar, and had the chance to see the impressive collections of Australian and International plants. The identification room, with a reference specimen sorted by families, was particularly useful for identifying species. It was the perfect end to my adventure-filled with fossils, forests, and an amazing community of researchers.
by Miriam Slodownik
