Reflecting on the final day of the ACTRA Annual Scientific Meeting a week ago in Canberra. Some very interesting sessions to round off the final day of the conference including:
- kicking off the day with an acknowledgement to Wear it Purple Day!
- Session 4: Climate Impact on Bushfires and their Toxic Effects with insightful presentations on managing landscape fire regimes (by Rochelle Christian), a natural experiment with exposure of rhesus monkeys to bushfire smoke (by Lisa Miller), and an account of in vitro interactions between carbonyl compounds (by Philip Burcham).
- Session 5: The recently aptly renamed Peter & Karen Di Marco Student Travel Grant was awarded to Luke Thompson for his innovative work on AmesFormer for mutagenicity prediction.
- Session 6: Understanding and mitigating the health impacts of extreme heat (by Ollie Jay), climate-dependent stock water screening levels for PFAS (by Katie Richardson), mitigating arsenic contaminated dust sources in a drying climate (by Kara Fry),
- Session 7 provided us with two great poster sessions over lunch on forecasting calls to the Poisons Info Centre during wild mushroom season (by Peter Bain) and safety assessment of micro/nano plastic libraries 2 (by Yasuo Tsutsumi).
- Session 8 focused on climate change and biota with presentations on subterranean biota and groundwater integrity preservation (by Mattia Sacco), poisonous plants & risks to livestock (by Rhian Cope), and the rise of moulds as a result of extreme weather events (complete with props by Jackii Shepherd).
- Taking us to the end of the conference in Session 9 was a great keynote by Jenny Stauber who illustrated how we can incorporate climate change considerations into environmental risk assessment with a case study in the Great Barrier Reef.
Thanks to everyone’s efforts in preparing your presentations and sharing your knowledge!!
Overall it was a fantastic meeting :)