 But now I'd like to invite to the stage Christiana McDonald Spicer Christiana is from the ANU College of Science and the title of her 3MT presentation tonight is Refugia Islands in the Landscape Climates are changing around the world too fast for plants and animals to evolve to keep up Just last year a small Australian mammal became the world's first to become extinct due to climate change The first but definitely not the last But although our climates overall are changing there are small pockets that are hardly changing at all I Called these areas refugia Areas that can act as islands of stability for plants and animals to survive in while the surrounding landscape changes Think of the present of the potential for conservation If we know where these areas are we could conserve them and give our plants and animals a better chance Surviving climate change, but first we have to find these areas That's where my research comes in I'm looking at what has happened over the last 80,000 years in northern Australia So I can find where these refugia have been in the past and predict what will happen in the future Now understanding the climate for the last 80 years is simple enough. We have a lot of records for that Understanding the climate for the last 80,000 years since before the last ice age That's a lot trickier I'm using pollen trapped in mud to help with this We can take mud cores and swamps in much the same way as we can take ice cores in Antarctica By looking at the pollen trapped in the mud we can work out what plants were alive at different time periods And from this I can work out what type of climate they were living in So I can combine this information with mathematical simulations to understand the changes that have happened in the climate over the last 80,000 years However animals don't see all changes in climate the same way If we take a jungle and add an extra 200 millimeters of annual rainfall No one really cares It was super wet and it's still super wet what much has changed But if we take a desert and add an extra 200 millimeters of rain This is a big deal the plants the animals that live there will be very different to what they were before So I'm combining information on where species live with information on the climate to understand the meaningful changes in climate The ones that actually matter But understanding what has happened in the past we can understand what will happen in the future My research will help us identify these refugia these islands of stability and if we can conserve them We can give our plants and animals a better chance at surviving climate change