Alice has been a board member for the European Tropical Ecology Society since 2014, but this year was invited to give a plenary to open the annual conference of the society from the 26-29^th of March and commemorate the work of Elisabeth Kalko who was a former member of the society and a pioneering bat researcher.

Alice opened the conference which took place at Marie and Pierre Curie University in the Sorbonne in Paris with a talk on “Importance of bats in the old world tropics and the threats to their future survival” which showcased the essential roles play in ecosystems globally, but with a special focus on the Old world Tropics.

The conference was attended by over 320 people from 54 countries and plenary speakers were chosen to represent different parts of the old-world Tropics, and a range of different biomes, and the talk was very well received.

The talk also highlighted the work of upcoming researchers including that of many of the researchers in the Landscape Ecology group for their pioneering work on bats across the Asian region.

Alice was also reelected to the board of the society and encourages more XTBG researchers to attend next year's meeting in Edinburgh

 Dr. Wu Junen and Dr. Chen Chunfeng from Ecohydrology Group of XTBG also participated in the meeting. They presented their research work entitled "Can intercropping with the world’s three major beverage plants help improve the water use of rubber trees?”and “Spatio-temporal variations of carbon and nitrogen in biogenic structures of two fungus-growing termites (M. annandalei and O. yunnanensis) in the Xishuangbanna region” respectively.