Connecting Country’s guest speaker Associate Professor Lauren Bennett will be speaking at the AGM on Thursday 19 November 2026 at the Mount Alexander Golfcourse Clubrooms, 54 Wimble Street, Castlemaine. Starting at 5.30pm.

Lauren is a part of the FLARE Wildlife Research team at Melbourne University, one of Australia’s largest wildfire research groups. Her research has a focus on processes in Australian ecosystems and involves a diversity of topics including carbon and nutrient cycling, vegetation quality and carbon assessment, plant regeneration strategies, plant interactions with soil, and plant responses to changing climate and fire regimes. Her recent work assesses fire impacts on ecosystems using a suite of integrated methods based on field and remotely sensed data, which are integrated into models for predicting effects of changing climate and fire regimes on ecosystem persistence and carbon stability.