What is in a waste expert's rubbish bin?

Prof Margaret Bates recently allowed the BBC to review what went in her waste bin.  Read about what they found here...

Geography students raise money for Wells for India

First year Geography students have been raising money for Wells for India.  The charity works with the poorest dryland communities in India, helping to secure access to safe water.

Senior Lecturer Dr Kevin Cook is a Trustee of the charity.  Kevin introduced the students to the work of the charity, and showed how charity's projects align with topics covered in class.

Caroline, Asifa, Georgia and Sarah looked after the stall in the morning.
Others helped out later in the day.

To raise money for the charity, the students ran a chocolate stall and an Easter egg raffle.

Staff, students and visitors to the library were given chocolate in return for a donation to the charity.

Third year Geographers learn about food waste

Third year Urban Geography students have been reflecting on their personal food waste. This relates to academic work carried out under the theme of Food and the City. Before visiting Elsie’s Café – Northampton’s RealJunk Food Project, Mr. Andy Fox, a volunteer at Elsie’s, visited the group and gave a talk on how the project works, and why it came into being. Then, the students visited the café on Charles St where they had the opportunity to sample the food and find out more about where the food comes from.

Students at Elsie's Café

 

Elsie’s Café is one of a network of over 150 such projects worldwide. Surplus, out of date food, items passed their sell by date, items in broken packaging etc. are donated from a variety of sources including supermarkets, restaurants, shops and allotments. Diners pay what they feel (#PAYF) is appropriate for their meal, money which finances the running of the kitchen and the café itself. There are now over 100 volunteers involved and the café is so busy now that they are looking for more volunteers to fill specific posts such as café manager/organiser. The project instigator Shena Cooper is looking forward to developing further links with the University. A big thank you to Elsie’s café for a very warm welcome and for sharing food and drinks with us – we’ll be back!

For further details see:

http://www.elsiescaftrjfp.org.uk/

http://therealjunkfoodproject.org

twitter: @elsie_caf

If you would like to get involved see:

contact@elsiescaftrjfp.org.uk

Research on water and energy issues in Brazil

John Horton has been awarded two ESRC grants to develop interdisciplinary research collaborations between UK-based Social Scientists and Brazilian Engineering Scientists. The projects will focus on children and young people’s everyday experiences of water and energy issues in São Paulo State.

Meeting community groups

Visiting one of the field sites

To launch this two-year programme of work, John travelled with the project’s Principal Investigator (Prof Peter Kraftl, University of Birmingham) to visit São Paulo state during January.

The trip involved a range of presentations, impact workshops, community visits, and fascinating fieldtrips to key sites relating to water and energy issues in the region. More information will follow in future blog posts.

Students assess wheelchair access on campus

First year Geography students have been carrying out fieldwork to evaluate the accessibility of Avenue Campus for wheelchair users. This relates to work carried out in class on 'geographies of disability'. Before conducting the exercise, students had the opportunity to interview members of the University's Wheelchair Basketball team, to find out more about the experiences of wheelchair users.

Dilan, Sharan, George, Aimee and James reviewing wheelchair access at Avenue Campus

Working in groups, students have taken a 30-minute walk with a wheelchair around an everyday route on campus. Everyone has had an opportunity to push, and be pushed in, the wheelchair. During the walk, students made fieldnotes reflecting upon how familiar everyday spaces can look and feel very different from the perspective of a wheelchair user.

Students then measured footpath and corridor widths, kerb heights, and slope gradients. These measurements were compared to Department for Transport guidance about accessible pedestrian environments.

Each group is now working hard to prepare an annotated map and summary of their key findings, ready for assessment. This exercise is designed to help students engage with recent academic research about geographies of disabilities. The project also provides a wealth of data which is really valued by the University of Northampton, as we seek to make the campus an accessible and inclusive place for all.

What is 'biodiversity'?

Professor Jeff Ollerton explains what is meant by the term 'biodiversity...


Ever since I set up the Biodiversity Blog in 2012 I’ve had it in mind to write a post asking the question “Just what is “biodiversity”?”, but have never quite got round to it, there’s been too many other interesting and important things to write about on here!  This week over at the Dynamic Ecology blog Brian McGill has beaten me to it with a really interesting post entitled:  Biodiversity and pizza – an extended analogy leading to a call for a more multidimensional treatment of nature.
I’m not entirely sure that the pizza analogy works, it’s a little tortuous, but none the less the post is provocative and interesting, and has generated a lot of comments.  I strongly recommend it.
In the interests of recycling, and because the readership of my blog only overlaps partially with that of Dynamic Ecology, thought I’d restate a few things that I brought up in the comments to Brian’s post (but this certainly won’t substitute for going over and reading it yourself”.

One of the questions that Brian asks is:  “Is biodiversity a useful term or has it outlived its usefulness?”  It’ll come as no surprise to readers that I like the word “biodiversity”: I used it for the title of my blog and for my professorship, because it captures a lot about what I value in the natural world, and because it’s a term that I’ve (professionally speaking) grown up with. To my mind it is an umbrella term that can mean different things to different people; some see this as a disadvantage but I think that, as long as we qualify precisely what we are referring to, using “biodiversity” in a loose way is not a problem. Perhaps an appropriate analogy is with politics: if someone describes themselves as a “conservative” or a “socialist” or a “liberal”, those terms cover huge internal variation and political scope, but it’s not a problem because it broadly describes the beliefs of that individual.
As an instance of when “biodiversity” may not be a useful concept for nature conservation, Brian gives an example of salt marsh, often areas with rather low species diversity, as being of low priority for conservation because they are poor in “biodiversity”.  But this ignores the fact that all of the “official” definitions of biodiversity explicitly include diversity of habitats/communities/ecosystems/biomes in a defined geographical area.  For example the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity defines it as:

“the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems.” [my emphasis]

Thus destroying an area of salt marsh may indeed result in few species being lost, but it would be a significant loss of biodiversity at that higher level of community/ecosystem, if a region has only salt marsh, woodland and grassland in it: in essence you’ve lost one third of your biodiversity because you’ve lost one third of your habitats.

Something that’s occurred to me over the last couple of days of reading comments and thinking about the questions that Brian posed is that “nature” and “biodiversity” are not actually synonymous at all. When people say they like “being in nature” or they “value contact with nature”, what they are usually saying is that they enjoy landscapes, seascapes, changes in the weather, being out of doors, etc., things which are not strictly part of what we understand as “biodiversity”.

Likewise, “protecting the environment” includes a whole set of non-biodiversity related questions and actions such as air and water quality, wastes management, sustainable use of resources, etc., much of which may not directly affect biodiversity at all.

“Biodiversity” has a specific meaning, as the definition above shows, even though that meaning can be broadly defined. Which sounds like a contradiction, but it’s not – and brought to mind the title of the Led Zeppelin fanzine: “Tight But Loose”*.  Biodiversity as a concept and as a field of research and action involves so many different types of stakeholder (ecologist, botanist, zoologist, artist, conservationist, activist) that (as I said) it provides a useful (loose) umbrella.  Problems only occur when people use different tight definitions and talk past one another.

The other aspect to Brian’s post is around the pros and cons of valuing ecosystem services, which is a much bigger argument in some ways, and I’m going to point readers to two blog posts, one recently from Steve Heard which I think is a very nice, concrete example that captures a lot of the uncertainties that Brian describes:
https://scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/invasions-beauty-and-ecosystem-services-a-conundrum/
The second is one of mine from last July related to the value of valuing nature, which was prompted by the Costanza et al. update paper:
https://jeffollerton.wordpress.com/2014/07/27/how-do-we-value-nature/
These are fascinating discussions that will run and run, I have no doubt.

*I’m found of bringing musical examples into these blog posts :-)


This blog post was first published here.

Professor of Biodiversity blogs about a spider named David Bowie

Jeff Ollerton, Professor of Biodiversity, writes a regular blog about his research.

Prof Jeff Ollerton

 
Recent posts have considered a new publication about pollination and biodiversity and Christmas. He also reflects on a spider named David Bowie...