BioNET-PACINET Awards Taxonomic Prizes For Student Conservations And Biodiversity Research

BioNET -PACINET, recently awarded prizes for the best presentations containing a taxonomic component at the University of the South Pacific, Annual Postgraduate Student Research Day for the Faculty of Science and Technology's Conservation and Biodiversity Research Group.

Twelve postgraduate students presented oral seminars about their conservation and biodiversity research on the day, half of which were deemed eligible for the PACINET Prizes in Taxonomy. The life forms being studied ranged from forest birds and invertebrates to microorganisms found in hot springs.

Competition was very tight as the quality of presentations was excellent however, the Award for the Best Presentation with taxonomic content went to Hilda Waqa for her talk entitled "Taxonomy, diversity and distribution of canopy Coleoptera along a landscape transect on eastern Viti Levu, Fiji." During her MSc field sampling Hilda collected 3326 individual canopy beetles from 28 families. From a literature search, she found that more than 1000 beetle species have been estimated to be found in Fiji of which only approximately 430 species have been described to date.

Hilda is in the final stages of writing up her MSc thesis and most fortunately for all concerned she will continue to work closely with the taxonomy of beetles and other insects on completion of her thesis when she will take up a position with a Darwin Initiative project on Fijian insect inventories for biodiversity assessment.

A PACINET Taxonomic Encouragement Award was also given and this went to Eleazar O'Connor for his presentation on "The effects of invasive alien species on ground dwelling skinks of Viwa Island, Tailevu." Eleazar's project, which examines the non-arboreal native skink fauna of a small inhabited island, is at a relatively early stage but forms part of a much larger program of biodiversity conservation management being undertaken on Viwa Island by a team of local researchers led by Eleazar's supervisor Dr Craig Morley.

This is the first time that PACINET has awarded student prizes at this event and it is expected that the book voucher prizes will be put to very good use. PACINET also hopes that the Awards will encourage more students to get interested in taxonomy, understand the importance of taxonomy to all forms of environmental research and develop strong taxonomic components within their future environmental projects.