Huge congratulatios to Nga Yee Lai, who has successfully completed her oral examination with pass with corrections!

Yee was the very first student to join Kaizen Conservation Group – she decided to join the group literally without anyone but Tatsuya, just before the COVID pandemic. Since then she has overcome many challenges, starting remotely, moving to Australia during the chaos of the pandemic, and then working with a massive global dataset of waterbird population time series collected at 40,000 sites.

The core challenge of her thesis lies in understanding complex community-level dynamics of waterbirds across broad spatial and temporal scales using multiple metrics. Her work tells us that we can’t easily capture global biodiversity changes with just a few simple indicators. Real biodiversity change is far more dynamic and messy, and her research leaves us with an even bigger challenge of linking our understanding of community changes to effective conservation practices and policies. Also she has always been an incredibly supportive member of the group.

Big congratulations again Yee!