Posted by the Ecology Ngātahi team @AklEcol

Everybody loves a birthday! It’s a chance to reflect on the year that’s been and make plans for the year to come. Hopefully we are all a little bit wiser too!

 
In the spirit of reflection, we wanted to revisit some of the highlights on the Ecology Ngātahi blog from our first year. Undoubtedly, the stars of the show have been the postgraduate students and their research. The first student post involved Josie Galbraith bringing together urban birds and teenage mutant ninja turtles. Animated characters were a common theme with Ant-Man and Batman also featuring in posts by Anna Probert and Ellery McNaughton.

 
Another popular theme was fieldwork. Sam Lincoln, Sam Heggie-Grace and Julia Kaplick shared their experiences as field ecologists. Other experiences shared were Jamie Stavert’s piece on his time in Europe and Carolina Lara’s piece on her experiences as an international student in NZ. Also, Anna Probert learnt all about ants and had fun doing it on her ant course. These three posts make interesting reading for anyone planning on spending time overseas. Something else any ecologist can relate to is frustrations with R and Jessica Devitt suggested some valuable resources she has discovered.

 
Other more quirky posts included Lloyd Stringer on NZ as a source of invasive species and Rebecca Lehrke’s experiences monitoring swan activity near the airport. Jamie Stavert wrote a fabulous post on the joy of creativity and Alice Baranyovits made a call for citizen scientists to get involved with her kereru project.

 
The most popular post by far was Jacqueline’s piece on kākāpō. It seems everyone loves a good news story! Cate’s tips for scoring a postdoc were widely shared on twitter. Margaret’s blog on the importance of urban ecology was another popular read and Mick explained the strange case of high genetic diversity in NZ stoat population.

 
So, it’s been a fascinating and wide-ranging year. I don’t think we expected to cover so many different topics when we started out last year. We have exciting plans for 2016. We welcome Darren Ward onto the Ecology Ngātahi team and we have a great bunch of new students and great projects. We’ll be continuing with weekly posts to highlight student research and topical issues in Ecology. We have recently launched our youtube channel so do look out for more clips about our research and don’t miss Josie’s animation on the impacts of feeding birds. Another new addition is our publications in a nutshell page where we will be posting brief summaries of new publications.

 
Thanks to you, our readers and followers for engaging with our work. We have had hits from over 110 countries with over 6000 unique visitors (hello world!). We appreciate you taking the time to have a look at the blog and share our stories on twitter and facebook.

 
Tau Hou hari! Happy new year!