ESQ Student Award Winner
10th June 2025
The 2025 ESQ Student Award Winner is Reid Emery for his project on sampling insects in macadamia orchards.
Reid's Honours research summary:
Optimisation of drop-sheet sampling in macadamia orchards: An optimised method for monitoring insect ecology
Understanding orchard arthropod populations is a critical element of making strategic decisions regarding pest management. In the macadamia industry, current sampling strategies are limited, and no single method reliably captures all species present. Drop-sheet sampling has shown promise as a more comprehensive approach, but it still requires refinement for standardised industry use. In this talk, I will discuss research that was conducted as a component of my Honours project, where the optimisation of drop-sheets was investigated to determine how sheet size affected insect ecology representation, sample time efficiency and required sampling effort. The findings of this study give the macadamia industry an opportunity to standardise drop-sheeting methods, where researchers and industry entomologists are able to sample all species present with accuracy while minimising effort.
