Welcome back to the Poor Pearls Almanac. As always, I'm your host, Andy, and today we're joined by Dr. Gray

Copeland from Murdoch University in southwestern Australia.

Gray started her ecological career working with seagrasses and moved into habitat

restoration on land through reforestation projects.

Now she works to bring Milwaukee forests into urban environments to increase urban biodiversity

and to rewild urban landscapes.

If you're not familiar with Milwaukee forests, please check out our previous episode where we dive into the science and history of these unique forests.

Myawaki forests go by a few different names,

such as tiny forests, and are highlighted as being a solution to tackle some of the issues around

reforestation, specifically around providing an appropriate amount of biodiversity in order to

have successful, resilient reforestation projects geared toward local ecological

conditions. Gray's work is incredibly inspiring, and you can see it on Instagram at

Myawaki Forest, W.A. And I think you all will really enjoy this conversation. I sure did.

Great. Thanks for joining us. Tell us a little bit about yourself. I'm an ecologist by my profession. I have a background in seagrass, mangrove's ecological restoration. I completed my

Ph.D. in mangrove systems up in the far north of Australia, so watching my back for crocodiles.

Also I did my sea grass research in shark-infested waters down the south coast down here, so, you know, a knife strapped to my side, more for my own peace of mind than for any real protection it offered.

Also, mother of two, a huge Jane Austen fan and K-drama addict.

Awesome.

Yeah, I feel like Australia is just a continent that wants to kill you.

So I think that's almost part for the course for you guys.

So it's interesting that you went from seagrass to getting into this concept of tiny forests or pocket forests.

There's basically a number of different terms that tend to get thrown around, usually in like, I don't know, like social media format where it's like, look at this tiny forest that they put in 100 square meters or whatever it might be. It's an interesting concept and I'm curious about how you kind of

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