The FIRE Lab team was out in force at Swansea University’s Science After Dark festival on October 30th. Virtually the whole of the Uplands area of the city became a night-time science park with a varied mix of exhibitions and performances to engage and entertain. We took over the top floor of The Book Shop bar […]
From Swansea to Solihull
Happy Friday readers! Yesterday, I swapped my usual routine of researching freshwater invertebrates, to teaching them to primary school children this week. For this, I visited Sharmans Cross Junior School (Solihull, West Midlands), who hosted a water day for their year 5 group (ages 9-10) so that the students could learn about how our precious […]
Investigating the world of marine inverts in Worms’s Head, Gower
Last week, Dr Ed Pope kindly offered me the opportunity to join him and his class of second year biosciences undergraduate students at Worm’s Head to take a glimpse of the intertidal marine invertebrate community. The weather was on our side, giving us a good window of sunshine to explore the fascinating inverts in the tidal […]
A Roundup Of The Blue Field Trip
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
What we owe to each other: Conducting ethical qualitative research along the River Tawe
This week we (Steph and Tara) submitted our project design for review by our internal ethics review board at Swansea University. We are now one step closer to field work and getting to know communities in the River Tawe catchment (here in South Wales)! This blog post will serve as a brief introduction to conducting […]
