Jelena Preradovic is a PhD student at School of Environment and Rural Science, University of New England located in Armidale, NSW.
Jelena’s PhD thesis includes a few questions that are focused on flower-visitors, such as flies, native bees, European honey bees, and ants in berry farms, located near Coffs Harbour. This is the largest growing region of berries in Australia, therefore it is essential to do more research on alternative pollinators, such as flies and native bees. During the research Jelena will evaluate the diversity of flower-visitors in raspberry farms, with a focus on non-bee pollinators and their interactions among each other, and with other flower-visitors. Furthermore, one of the questions is to investigate if alternative flies reared in controlled conditions and released in blackberry polytunnels, will pollinate flowers. Related to this, Jelena will evaluate if additional substrate near polytunnels will help to retain flies and provide the resources for their reproduction, which is important for establishing more resilient pollination services and pollination management in the future.
“There are several things that I am super interested in my project, however the most interesting is improving the knowledge of the behaviour of insects when interacting at flowers, since some taxa can impact the movement of others and there is evidence abroad of wild pollinators improving the efficiency of honey bees”.
Jelena’s supervisory team includes Prof. Romina Rader, Dr Lena Schmidt and Dr Blake Dawson. Jelena is a PhD student in the Rader Community Ecology Lab.
