Out In The Field Last week I went on a couple of FIRE Lab field trips with colleagues Steph and Joelle to walk the River Tawe Path, making cyanotypes, or blueprints, along the way. I’d prepared Bockingford paper with a solution of two chemicals, Ammonium ferric citrate and Potassium ferricyanide, in a darkroom and took them with me […]
Can cameras improve the monitoring of freshwater systems?
Hello everyone! My name is Loren Gittings and I am an MSc student at Swansea University currently undertaking my dissertation within the FIRE lab team. I am very excited to have the opportunity to share details of my MSc project with you all. My project explores how underwater cameras can be used to quantify the […]
Fire in the hole! Watch out for art and science along the Tawe River
A few months ago myself, Rose, and James headed up the Tawe River valley as part of some exploratory research in relation to science and art on tributaries to the Tawe. We are looking at differences on culverted and non-culverted streams, and bringing together arts and sciences to do so. It’s a growing area of […]
Reflections from ‘Sacred Rivers and Climate Change’ at London’s Climate Action Week
The UK parliament is the first in the world to declare a climate emergency, and in turn the capital city launched its first climate action week (EcoWatch, 2019). The London Climate Action Week had more than 150 events taking place around the city, bringing people together across many sectors to identify solutions and find new […]
How culverts transform rivers
In an earlier blog post, I wrote about how the River Tawe harbours a range of flora and fauna despite a long history of neglect and strain inflicted by human activities. While changes in the management of rivers has improved ecological conditions across the catchment, ecosystems supported within the Tawe are still threatened by different […]
Why roads near freshwater bodies in protected areas need to be located
Hello to all our readers! I am so enthusiastic about starting this journey with FIRELAB again after my long break in India. Since I returned, I have been regularly working on the Global River Obstruction Database (GROD) and framing new research questions. This week, I’d like to share about a small-scale upcoming project which will […]
A round of updates from FIRE Lab
We have been posting on the FIRE Lab blog for around 7 months now, and we recently held a lab meeting, since Sayali returned, and decided we would move to writing a blog post every two weeks instead of weekly. So you will be hearing less from us, but we hope that when do hear […]
Reflections from the first ‘What is Water?’ event
We here at FIRE lab held our first ‘What is Water’ event on 26 April at Copper Bar in Swansea. We created this event in part to start conversations about water, and to engage with different relationships that people in Swansea and surrounding communities have with water. Engaging with diverse relationships related to water, particularly […]
Reflecting on our knowledge of dams and water resources
Blog post by Michiel Jorissen, FIRE Lab collaborator A few weeks ago, Steph invited me – as a citizen scientist on the GROD project – to join and contribute to the Global Dam Watch workshop held at WWF headquarters in Zeist, Netherlands. It was lovely meeting Steph in person after playing #damornot on Twitter for […]
Exploring our lives through poetry
A few weeks ago Tara and I lead a group activity exploring poetry during Journal Club organized by postgraduate students in our Biosciences Department. Sat alongside a local stream, the idea of the activity was to get us all thinking about poetry, and using it to communicate about our work, daily lives, and associated encounters […]