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In everyday life, soils are moved from one place to another for construction and mining. I was given a rather unique challenge: moving a 60-year-old field experiment for a housing development. The experiment was of very few long-term experiments exploring soil pH, which farmers and gardeners often manage for better…
Seabird islands are fascinating places. Their unique ecology means you never know what to expect, as the composition of plants and animals on the island can change dramatically from year to year. Growing up in North Berwick, a town in southeast Scotland, the small island of Craigleith has always loomed…
In the week of 7th-11th of June 2021 Aberdeen partners delivered a planned training event called SANH BAAP GWAS Training Workshop. It ran for four hours every day for a week and was attended by 25 trainees and three trainers.
SANH is a £17M GCRF project funded by UKRI with…
The title of our project was “Patterns and drivers of change in the alpine plant communities of Creag Meagaidh NNR”. This meant we were looking at how the plant communities of this mountain range have changed in relation to climate change, deer grazing, and nitrogen deposition. We used information from…
A university field-course when students are in different places.
Q2: What do you do if you are a school of biological sciences which prides itself on the range of field courses on offer and a pandemic strikes and all group activities have to stop? We’re certainly not alone in struggling…
During my time as an undergraduate conservation biologist, I concluded that we all have a conservation niche. Some are mad about mammals. Others can spot and identify birds from a mile off. My niche is insects. From watching the humble bees of my back garden to enjoying the flashy, jewel…
“What are you going to do after your PhD?”
We face difficult questions in our research. There’s another difficult question—well for me anyway—was “what are you going to do afterwards?”. Maybe I found it hard because I’d given up a job for my PhD. And of course, Covid-19 certainly didn’t…
I model projections of bioenergy crop yield and energy, carbon capture, and environmental impacts, and in the last year myself and Astley Hastings have published three papers on Miscanthus x giganteus as a bioenergy crop. What I have discovered is that in England miscanthus is a robust bioenergy crop against…
When I mention that my PhD is in wildfire ecology, most people immediately ask if I study the fires in Australia or California. I am often met with surprise when I reply that I study Scottish wildfires and that there are in fact plenty of wildfires here. While these fires…
The astronomer Carl Sagan famously said that “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff.” But while…
