 This project is one which I've been working with Professor Marilyn Ball here at the Australian National University on the demise of an iconic plant species on the sub-antarctic island Macquarie Island. I was so fortunate to be asked to be involved in this project because getting to go down to Macquarie Island and spending six weeks there is a dream come true. It was an amazing experience even though I am not terribly fond of the cold and I don't like hiking in the rain. There were a lot of compensatory factors it made it an amazing experience. I went down in April 2015 the first time it was just a very short trip and we just basically to get the lay of the land and learn a little bit about the plants from the biologists who work regularly down there and then I spent six weeks from the end of November through to early January in 2016. These are cushion plants and from these photographs you can see that they sort of look like green boulders. The canopy is tightly packed with turgid thick leaves but the leaves die off in winter so they have a dormancy period. The plant itself the root system of this plant tends or seems to have many anchoring capability it doesn't extract water from the soil to supply water to the leaves. That water comes from within the cushion itself and the material inside the cushion consists of decades in some cases of last years and the previous years growth that's slowly decayed and so it's moist and it's nutrient-rich and there's little adventitious roots that grow into it and extract the nutrients and the moisture to supply the leaves with the necessary requirements for life. The leaves also have little spines that stick out the top and these spines trap cloud that's blowing over the cushion and little droplets condense on these spines and then that water can get sucked directly into the plant. So the plant is well endowed to cope with a misty cold wet environment. Some work that was done by the Antarctic division scientists at Bergstrom et al. 2015 they looked at the Penman-Monteith equation which estimates evaporative losses and they did this for the growing period November through to March or so from about 1990-ish through to 2010. They have this period of looking at evaporative losses and what they show is that there's been a decadal drying and so that the plants are getting access to less and less water as we move into the 2000s into the new century.