Ian Thompson

Hedging our bets: partnering horticulture and conservation | Botanic Gardens of Sydney For the team at the Research Centre for Ecosystem Resilience (ReCER), a request from the Blue Mountains Botanic Garden to design a hedge of the towering Nothofagus moorei, or Antarctic beech, sparked ...

Preserving another almost dinosaur tree

www.botanicgardens.org.au/discover-and...

It’s the day you can eat mudcake, or layer cake or any cake with a farm, trees or garden on top as a service to soil.

I got tired of studies saying historians were one of the top professions that could be replaced by AI. It just didn't sound right to me.

Librarians, curators, and teachers all score as much less "replaceable", and lawyers score much, much lower still. And I think I figured out why. /1

The same. We have many winter flowering natives, eucalyptus, grevillea, correas. Plenty of ground cover with almost no deciduous trees or shrubs. Hardenbergia dies a bit of ivy like running too. Even our native clematis are evergreen and good to minus 10°C. Many like sandy soil, ivy happy in heavy.

Only thing ivy does in our ecosystem is provide runways for feral rats. It can stay in Europe.

Your valerians and seaside daisies are rampant too. They are survivors. Got some love in the mist, pyrethrum daisies and Flanders poppies too?

A rabbit under every tree used to be a rule and livestock afterbirth under the roses. You can always use lots of seaweed extracts and manure too. My old cats support shrubs.

Many of us received conventional wisdom that mistletoe was bad for trees. Apparently that’s wrong. Trees and ecosystems need mistletoe, and birds are critical to its survival. Mistletoe does have amazing flowers and one in Westen Australia lives in the ground and flowers for Christmas.

Worth a read if you are contemplating participating in the nature repair market

Or a new bird of prey circling above? Might have trouble getting ethics approval for a statistically valid experiment. But hen cam could be enlightening. In my experience hen bullying makes school playgrounds seem tame.

Why your Spotify Wrapped probably doesn’t have any new Australian music on it If you don't have Australian artists on your Spotify Wrapped, you're not alone - it's the result of a structural, not individual, problem.

It’s no accident that foreign streaming services do little to promote Australian music and podcasts to Australians…and it’s no accident that our governments have chosen not to do more to fix it. Local content matters more in the digital age than ever

thepoint.com.au/news/251204-...

In radio days stations regularly played a seemingly random selection of new releases, good, bad and indifferent. Even occasionally invited local groups into a studio. All very homely. And at night kids listened to distant AM stations. The Internet should make that easier, not harder

Powdered egg is ok for cooking to save money but I wouldn’t recommend storing it for long. Misspent youth. Rotten egg gas is toxic in enclosed spaces.

Legend has it the Gough Whitlam as well as duxing year 12 twice, because he was too young to go to uni, also came first twice in theology, but not given the prize because being while good at the theory he was sprung for not believing. I don’t think religious studies performance is career limiting.

Wait till they change all the work email addresses and staff have work iPhones

The Ten Best Science Books of 2025 From “experimental archaeology” to the mysterious appeal of exploration, the wide-ranging subjects detailed in these titles captivated Smithsonian magazine’s science contributors this year

Grateful @smithsonianmag.bsky.social's Carlyn Kranking let me share a few of my favorite reads for the year end list of the top science books—titles by @carlzimmer.com, Ben Weissenbach, and Alex Hutchinson. www.smithsonianmag.com/science-natu...

I agree but it confused me in Sydney, Hasn’t quite got the nuance right between turn left and veer left or straight ahead but veering right in weird angular intersections with all roads leading off at a dogleg. How does it go on a hook turn. I have only done on a bike. In Melbourne go another way.

Will wend your way through them but I just read elsewhere it was the tears of Frigg for her murdered some Baldr that set mistletoe off. bsky.app/profile/vene.... Maybe there are some nice stories about American mistletoe too.

And I am just working my way through the mistletoe expert’s papers on the links between songbird and mistletoe evolution. You know how Norse gods used birds as intermediaries, maybe Frigg sent a little song bird to seed the mistletoe. bsky.app/profile/ecos...

Now if one came that looked like a smartwatch it could be a cool accessory. Bit like hearing aids are not fashionable, iPods are. Design issue?

Warning after deadly disease detected in Australia

Japanese encephalitis has been detected in Australia for the first time in the 2025-2026 season (get vaccinated) www.9news.com.au/national/jap...

For a highly prestigious publication a journalist is looking for conservation projects that changed what they were doing after looking at the evidence or undertaking a test. Please say working on a project that would be a good example and would like some fame. Can be anywhere in the world. Thanks.

Best books of 2025: our experts share their picks We found out the favourite 2025 books of 35 expert readers – and the Books & Ideas team shares our own picks, too.

And here is another eclectic book list for Christmas and the giving season by diverse experts, many
with an environmental bent theconversation.com/best-books-o...

Who doesn’t like a good book list. Australia’s Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities & Treasury is an eclectic reader. Must be saving his crime fiction for Xmas. Tip, only 49 books are in the graphic www.andrewleigh.com/favourite_bo...

A young American kestrel, nearing the age of fledging. He is in the process of being banded and being held by the bander.

This is good news because America's smallest falcon has been on the decline for years. Our findings support that these cute fluff balls can be a powerful, affordable, and effective tool for farmers to use to co-manage their farms for multiple goals.

Lynx has a cologne! The deodorant is bad enough. Don’t know anyone who thinks Lynx smells any good except 14 to 17 year old boys, particularly those who don’t like to wash. Have to get boys into a sport that involves water. Chlorine is bearable.

The fatal shore The search for a scientific explanation for South Australia’s unprecedented algal bloom – which decimated marine life, perhaps irreparably – is being frustrated by a political desire for easy answers

Maybe this link works?

www.themonthly.com.au/december-202...

If you can access this article by James Bradley on the Sth Aust algal bloom it’s worth a read. The problems of lack of data, limited expertise, delays, limited coordination, need for no regrets long & short term action & R&D could apply to any environmental issue

themonthly-admin/december-202...

🚨 Excited to share our new research! 🚨

We tackle a big question in conservation: how can we make smarter use of existing surveys to learn about places and species we haven’t yet been able to survey? 🏔️

🔗 Read the paper here: doi.org/10.1111/2041...

“INSTEAD, the random mixes of plants from similar climates but different locations were absolutely kick-ass at keeping out cheatgrass (figure 2d), while the same-site mixes let it run rampant.”