Details of Award
NERC Reference : NE/M006697/1
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:
- Earth
- Terrestrial
- Overall Classification:
- Terrestrial
- ENRIs:
- Biodiversity
- Global Change
- Natural Resource Management
- Science Topics:
- Biodiversity
- Plant ecology
- Earth & environmental
- Community Ecology
- Conservation Ecology
- Systematics & Taxonomy
- Abstract:
- We offer a 2 week training course in response to the need for increased 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, basic vegetation inventory and monitoring techniques and then concentrates on the technically most demanding aspect, which is plant identification. Unlike in the UK, plants are not easy to identify in the tropics for a number of reasons. By teaching students how to overcome the 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 plants. The course is one of the few in the world that teaches students to identify plants the way they are encountered in the tropics, i.e. based on leaves and vegetative characters alone. Most courses and identification books focus on the use of flowers and fruits for plant identification, which is valuable when working in herbaria or in the temperate regions. Field studies in the tropics, however, require the ability to identify, distinguish, categorise, and survey plants based on sterile characters alone, and this is the gap is targeted by this course. The course provides students with the ability to carry out independent and safe field work in any tropical area through delivering skills in the process of identification, not just in particular plant families or vegetation types. The course is an existing field course part of the MSc course "Biodiversity and Taxonomy of Plants" taught jointly by University of Edinburgh and Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE). The field course has been refined and developed since its start in 2003. Over the years, the course 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 Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The course is taught in Belize and each year students and staff from University of Belize and conservation NGOs join in. 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 regular stream of applicants for the MSc field course and the Field Botany Certificate demonstrates that there is a continuing demand for fieldwork skills training. The popularity of the course reflects a wide demand for the skills required to carry out inventories in poorly documented and highly diverse areas and to identify plants in the tropics. The course is taught by highly 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 the late 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 increase the post-graduate skills level required to deliver high-quality research in these fields in the tropics where many successful UK science programs 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/M006697/1
- Grant Stage:
- Completed
- Scheme:
- Doctoral Training
- Grant Status:
- Closed
- Programme:
- Advanced Training
This training grant award has a total value of £22,950
FDAB - Financial Details (Award breakdown by headings)
| Total - Other Costs |
|---|
| £22,950 |
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