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Saltaire Festival Science Fair

The Saltaire Festival is an annual celebration of music and art run by volunteers, but this year it wasn’t just art on show – Kirsty Pringle (SEE) and Tay-Yibah Aziz (STEM Public Engagement Intern) decided to inject a bit of science into the event by running a successful science fair. Read more »

This entry was posted in Events.

SRI goes to Iceland

Over 400 people from around the world attended the recent International Society for Ecological Economics Conference (ISEE 2014) http://isee2014.yourhost.is/, held this year at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, Iceland, from 12-15 August 2014. Eight of us from the Sustainability Research Institute (SRI) made the trip, the largest attendance of any UK Institute, and one of the largest overall, which shows how far SRI has come in 10 years. Read more »

This entry was posted in Conference, Events, Uncategorised.

Geophysics Fieldtrip to Malham – June 2014

Our 2nd year Geophysics students enjoyed a 5 day residential field trip to Malham in June 2014. Read more »

This entry was posted in Student Fieldtrip.

Tanzania – My first time in Africa

A few months ago Nico Favretto sent Lindsay Stringer and I an email announcing a conference on the green economy in the South, for July 2014 in Dodoma, Tanzania. “We should apply for this!” he wrote. It was an excellent opportunity to present our work on Brazil’s ethanol diplomacy in Africa so we submitted an abstract, which was accepted, and then had to tackle the question of who should go? Lindsay and Nico had other work commitments, luckily for me. It would be my first visit to Africa and I was very much looking forward to it. It would also be the first time I had to apply for a visa. A trip to remember undoubtedly… Read more »

This entry was posted in Conference, Research Trip.

Sharing a field research experience from Botswana’s drylands

Almost a year has passed since I joined an exciting research project aimed at finding ways to fight land degradation in Southern Africa (http://see.leeds.ac.uk/research/sri/eld/). While both scientists and the media have widely stressed how vulnerable people are to environmental change, and how important fighting land degradation is to sustain the livelihoods of the poorest dryland communities, I have always wondered what a researcher like me could do to stimulate a positive change. Read more »

This entry was posted in Research Trip.

Connemara 2014

The Connemara field trip is always interesting for the varied weather that it throws at the field class. The photos with this blog post demonstrate the same outcrop on each of the two successive weeks; clearly it was better to have been on the first week! Read more »

This entry was posted in Student Fieldtrip.

Weather Workshop – University of Leeds Festival of Science – by Lindsay Bennett

On 2nd and 3rd April, Lindsay Bennett (NCAS, SEE), Victoria Smith (NCAS, SEE) and Matt Amison (PhD student, SEE) ran an interactive “Weather Workshop” for high school students for the Leeds Festival of Science. The two-hour sessions used fun demonstrations to show how clouds form and how different instruments are used to observe the weather. As the students came in they were each given a piece of a jigsaw and asked to find which cloud picture it belonged to, which set them up in their groups for the rest of the session. They then had to figure out the names of the clouds using a guide. The students were asked to think about the different types of careers a meteorologist might have and the variety of organizations they could work in, some of which came as quite a surprise, e.g. Formula 1. After revealing the names of the clouds and showing some videos of extreme weather to highlight the importance of understanding how cumulonimbus clouds form, the fun demos began. Read more »

This entry was posted in Events, News.

Reflections on Resilience 2014 (Montpellier, 4-8th May 2014): ‘Conferences are perfect for….’

Resilience2014 was the third International Science and Policy Conference. With over 1200 papers proposed, 700 papers and posters were accepted for the conference, including 5 from SRI. Jami, Rachel and Steve travelled down on Sunday 4th May by train (admittedly with a few hiccups due to Rachel’s sense of direction and heading to the wrong train, and Jami leaving her tickets in the office needing a detour from Steve to collect them). Paola, Claire and Lindsay were all flying in on the Monday from different parts of the world. Read more »

This entry was posted in Conference.

Amsterdam SOEE2570 Fieldtrip

A group of seven staff members and 50 2nd year undergraduate students from our BSc Sustainability and Environmental Management and BA Environment and Business degrees spent the week learning about sustainability in Amsterdam. As part of their programme our students have been putting their research skills into action by conducting their own research projects on three sustainability themes: water management, sustainable transport, and waste management. The fieldtrip was a great chance for our students to apply their classroom knowledge to a real sustainability problem and to gain the experience of conducting their own research. Read more »

This entry was posted in Student Fieldtrip.

Frogspawn, Fieldwork, and Empty Hallways

Easter; that time of year when the daffodils are out, lambs bleat in the fields, frogs spawn in every drop of still water and students disappear to far-flung exotic locations. Like Connemara. Every Easter, the School echoes to the sound of footsteps from the few staff that remain in the department, as each thinks about their colleagues who are out in the elements, teaching their students all there is to know about how much it rains in the Lake District, how rocks bend in Pembrokeshire, or how to sift dirt from rivers in Scotland. Read more »

This entry was posted in Student Fieldtrip.

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