<p>MARISSA STONE (webcam): My name is Marissa Stone and I’m studying a Bachelor of Environmental Science. I’m studying externally part time from Brisbane and recently I was enrolled in the ENV304 Field Studies in Tropical and Desert Landscapes.</p><p>So here we are on the 304, 504 field trip. First stop learning field techniques.</p><p>So we went out to Glen Helen we had our first speaker out there basically just learning field techniques.</p><p>CHRISTINE SCHLESINGER: You’ll see that we’re going to have to modify the techniques that we use depending on the different vegetation types. So I thought it would be useful for you to actually be in something that’s a bit more like what we’ll see up the road so we can start to think about - ok, we’re going to have to deal with some quite different vegetation structures.</p><p>MARISSA STONE: We had four guest speakers all around Alice Springs area.</p><p>GARY BASTIN: So the second topic I talked about this morning is Carbon dynamics and I talked about the witchetty bush as a …</p><p>MARISSA STONE: They spoke about the pastoral industry, vegetation communities, landscape organisation, fire management all around that area as well. Which is good ‘cause any of the kind of vegetation that your going to monitor, it’s all going to be effected by the type of land management in that area so it’s all very valid to what we were studying.</p><p>WAYNE BARBOUR: We’re sharing what we have with what …</p><p>MARISSA STONE: Day four we started acquiring the field data. From about day 6 we also began doing data entry where we all began to collate the data from each of the groups so that we could gather some summary data to analyse at the end of the trip.</p><p>Day 7 making our way to Mataranka with the next day we were allowed to do our own field site on our own, unsupervised. Everyone in the group just kind of took a bit of ownership of what they were doing and stepped up and took a bit more leadership I guess.</p><p>It helps to inspire you again because being external I guess you just kind of, you know stuck in this little room while I’m studying. Nearly everyone that I asked, I said well what do you want to do at the end of the course and most people went “I don’t know” but possibly towards the end maybe people will have a bit more of an idea of what direction they want to head in.</p><p>Great experience. Like it was really fun. Great adventure.</p>