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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
FIRE lab goes international – Attending a workshop on ecosystem services in Brazil.
Happy Friday readers! This week’s blog post describes a workshop that I (James White) recently attended in Brazil. After joining the FIRE lab team in August, I have been hoping to undertake a stronger, inter-disciplinary approach to my studies. Given that my research background has entailed examining ecological processes within river environments (see here), one […]
The quest for dam data – #DamOrNot 2/2
In last week’s blog post, I wrote about #DamOrNot, a weekly game I host on Twitter, and shared definitions and imagery of different infrastructure we commonly encounter in the game. This week I’ll work to address a few questions that came through on Twitter. A few of these questions came from Michiel Jorisson, an active […]
Exploring freshwater geographies: Approaches and prospects for engaged research methods
I arrived at Swansea University with a background in cultural geography and qualitative research methodologies and methods. In particular, I am very fond of using ethnographic research methods— including participant observation, interviewing, and photographic work to explore the lived, everyday worlds of research participants. I use in-depth observation and participation through ethnographic fieldwork to understand […]
