Details of Award
NERC Reference : NE/N018923/1
Fieldwork skills in the tropics: vegetation surveys, monitoring, and plant identification.
Training Grant Award
- Lead Supervisor:
- Dr D Harris, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Tropical Biology
- Grant held at:
- Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Tropical Biology
- Science Area:
- Terrestrial
- Overall Classification:
- Terrestrial
- ENRIs:
- Biodiversity
- Environmental Risks and Hazards
- Global Change
- Natural Resource Management
- Science Topics:
- Community Ecology
- Conservation Ecology
- Population Ecology
- Systematics & Taxonomy
- Abstract:
- We offer a 2 week training course in response to the need for fieldwork skills in surveying and monitoring in tropical vegetation. These skills are required for a range of environmental sciences including plant ecology, forestry and systematics, in addition to many interdisciplinary studies. The course teaches general field skills, vegetation inventory and monitoring techniques and then concentrates on the technically most demanding aspect, which is plant identification. Because of the phenomenal taxonomic diversity in the tropics, plants are not easy to identify. By teaching students how to overcome difficulties in identifying plants in the field, in the tropics, we dramatically increase the value of the data they can gather when surveying and monitoring. The course is one of the few in the world that teaches students to identify plants based on vegetative characters alone, which is how the majority of tropical plants are encountered because at any one time, few species are flowering. Most courses and identification books focus on the use of flowers and fruits for identification, which is more relevant to working in herbaria or temperate regions where flowering is more synchronous. Field studies in the tropics, therefore, require the ability to identify plants based on vegetative characters alone, and this is the skill emphasised on this course. It provides students with the ability to carry out independent, safe and scientifically relevant fieldwork in the tropics by training in a wide range of field skills. The course has been developed as a field course module for the MSc course "Biodiversity and Taxonomy of Plants" taught jointly by University of Edinburgh and Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE). The course format and content have been used to set up the RBGE Certificate in Field Botany which is taught twice a year in Edinburgh and Kindrogan Field Studies Council site with an average of 40 participants per year. The field course has been refined and developed since its start in 2003. It has attracted many external participants including PhD students from University of Edinburgh, University of Oxford, University of Sheffield, post-doctoral researchers from University of Oxford, and staff members from University of Edinburgh and RBG, Kew. The course is taught in Colombia or Belize and each year students from those countries participate in the course. When this course was advertised as an ASTC course in 2014 it received 55 applications. The popularity of the course reflects a wide demand for the skills required to identify plants in the tropics in order to document highly diverse but poorly known areas. The course is taught by very experienced staff. The teaching methods are based on more than ten years of experience of delivering the course based on the ideas and techniques developed by Alwyn Gentry in his ground breaking "Field guide to the families and genera of woody plants of Northwest South America" in 1993. The course delivers the core of Gentry's skills, which included the ability to go anywhere in the tropics and identify plants even when they are not flowering. The skills provided through the course have impact on science across several fields. Food security, biodiversity, ecology,ecosystem services and climate change research all depend on our ability to survey, monitor, and identify plants. The course will develop skills of post-graduates allowing them to deliver high-quality research in the tropics where many successful UK science programmes are based and where most plant diversity lies. Previous students from this course have contributed and continue to contribute original and high-impact research across environmental and biological sciences.
- NERC Reference:
- NE/N018923/1
- Grant Stage:
- Completed
- Scheme:
- Doctoral Training
- Grant Status:
- Closed
- Programme:
- Advanced Training
This training grant award has a total value of £43,162
FDAB - Financial Details (Award breakdown by headings)
| Total - Other Costs |
|---|
| £43,162 |
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