Congratulations to Carolina Galindez Silva on her PhD completion

Please contact Carolina to find out more about her PhD project.

Carolina’s thesis is titled “Fire, resources and behavioural responses of ground-dwelling mammals”, and she investigated how bush rats and swamp wallabies responded to a change in availability and distribution of vegetation resources due to a low-intensity planned fire at Henderson Creek in the Otways. 

She used microsatellite genotyping to study movement of bush rats between slopes and gullies, and GPS technology to study swamp wallabies’ home range, habitat use and movement during the fire event. 

The fire did not adversely affect the two study species, although the responses were variable, reflecting the importance of investigating the effect of planned burns at different spatial and temporal scales.