Hello again all. It’s Rochelle here. I recently attended, and presented at, the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly. I presented in the session: Geo-infrastructure monitoring: complex data analysis and instrument application. My talk was titled: Creating a spatially explicit road-river infrastructure dataset to benefit people and nature (paper forthcoming in Journal of Environmental Management […]
Reflections from Sector Symbiosis conference
Hi, I’m Rochelle. I graduated from Swansea University in 2021, and have since been a research assistant here at FIRE Lab. Last month, I attended a virtual conference, Sector Symbiosis: The Art of Interdisciplinary Working for Ecological Benefit, held by Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management (CIEEM). The conference had a series of talks […]
Where can we find road-river bridges and culverts?
Hello out there??!! We have been quiet on the blog but also busy advancing on our research, creations, and engagement programs with schools and preparing for an exciting arts festival in Bangor (Metamorffosis). Today though we are excited to share a newly published paper based on our ongoing efforts to map road-river infrastructure across Great […]
How city roads trap migrating fish
Greater London is crisscrossed by 14,800km of public roads, each with an average width of 8m. This network accounts for 8% of the metropolitan area, and motorways and A-roads alone cross the Thames and its tributaries at least 400 times. A similar picture is seen in cities across the world. You’ve heard of, and maybe […]
Culverts – the major threat to fish you’ve probably never heard of
You probably cross rivers every day without realising it. Beneath the concrete underfoot are culverts – tunnels installed under roads and railways that allow rivers to pass from one side to the other. Like bridges, culverts allow people to cross rivers, but unlike bridges, culverts often don’t allow the fishes living in those rivers to […]
Exploring European Eel journeys through Clyde River Catchment
Hello! Kherlen here, and I am back on the blog to share about my MSc dissertation research, which I am leading with the FIRE Lab team. My project explores how instream infrastructure (bridges, dams, weirs) can affect the migration of European Eels (Anguilla anguilla) in River Clyde catchment, Scotland. It is hard to imagine a […]
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 […]
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 […]