Sample seminar presentation

To give you an idea about the sample presentation used in this tutorial, here is some background information about the presenter and her research. The title of the sample seminar presentation is "Identification of Sediment and Associated Phosphorus Sources to the Tarago Reservoir". The speaker is Fiona Dyer, a postgraduate student at the University of Melbourne who was then located at CSIRO Land and Water in Canberra. Fiona's general field is catchment hydrology. Broadly speaking, she is investigating the differences in the chemistry of soils located near one of Melbourne's water reservoirs, the Tarago Reservoir. In the seminar, she is presenting an overview of her PhD research and some of her major findings.

The background to Fiona's research is that the quality of the water in the Tarago Reservoir is often below the quality needed for drinking water in Australia. The poor quality is a result of the high levels of sediment and associated nutrients contained in the water. The aim of her research project is to identify the sources of the sediment and the associated phosphorus in the reservoir using a sediment tracing approach.

The main stages in her presentation are:

1. Background information about the Tarago catchment
2. The volume and distribution of sediment in the reservoir
3. The sediment tracing approach
4. The effects of abrasion and breakages on tracing parameters
5. The identified sediment sources

Fiona concludes her seminar presentation by summarising the key findings of her research. Her findings are that the dominant sources of sediment in the Tarago Reservoir are sedimentary- and basalt-derived soils, while the dominant sources of phosphorus are basalt-derived soils. She also outlines the implications of these findings for catchment management.