Honours Student
Lou Peake is currently an Honours student with the McGeoch Research Group at La Trobe University. Lou completed their Bachelor of Science at Sydney University, and it sparked an interest in the intersection between data science and ecology. They first came to the McGeoch Research Group and Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future (SAEF) as a research intern. During this time, they worked on a dataset of alien species in the Antarctic region. Their honours project is investigating global invasive species trends in richness, abundance, and geographic spread. Their specific focus is on the models that have been developed to measure trends and how well they can perform across different taxa, regions, and time periods. As part of SAEF, they are looking at how these trends present themselves in an Antarctic context. Antarctica is a very unique region so typical alien species models and methods may not always apply.