Dr Tilly Collins, from Imperial College London’s Centre for Environmental Policy, and her 16-year-old son – Douglas – spent a month this summer in the Kibale Forest of Western Uganda. Dr Collins was part of a Tropical Biology Association (TBA) team, which ran skill and capacity-building field courses to train future conservation leaders, bringing together graduate students from the host continent and the rest of the world.
In this post, Dr Collins writes a weekly log of her adventures!
A Silwood Park student team became the champions of a national wildlife competition where they competed to identify as many mammals as possible. Max Khoo from the MSc Ecology, Evolution and Conservation course takes us through the tools of animal investigation that allowed them to emerge victorious!
Sanjeevani Panditharatne is a PhD student in the Space and Atmospheric Physics Group in the Department of Physics. She writes to us from the icy mountains of Andøya, Norway, where she is weathering snow storms to study how cirrus clouds affect the Earth’s warming.
By Sanjeevani Panditharatne
I’m part of a team of three who have headed to Andøya, a remote Norwegian island inside the Arctic circle to better understand the link between high-altitude ice clouds and their climate impact within the far-infrared region!
Abigail Croker is a PhD Student in the Centre for Environmental Policy, funded by the SSCP DTP, Grantham Institute, and affiliated with the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society. In this post, she tells us about the challenges the world faces when tackling wildfires in the era of climate change. Her fieldwork in the Tsavo Conservation Area in Kenya tells us that we need to look beyond the Global North for fire management practices.
Students from the MSc Ecology, Evolution and Conservation course ventured to Lundy Island to learn fundamental fieldwork techniques. Max Khoo tells us about his experience birdwatching, accompanied by his photographs of the island’s wildlife and landscape.
By Max Khoo
It was 2.00 on a Monday, 28 November 2022. Alarms were ringing, and 33 students from the MSc Ecology, Evolution and Conservation course had been up since just past midnight. Despite this, we were more than excited for what was to come, for it was not like any other week on campus. We would be travelling across land, air and sea to a remote island off Devon where the Bristol Channel meets the Atlantic Ocean: Lundy Island, where we would be spending our time learning about biodiversity and population biology on a field course.
