Field insights from the Philippines

Posted on 2nd August 2025 by Marion

In July this year, PhD candidate Jelaine Lim Gan graduated with her PhD and can now proudly claim the title of Dr Jelaine. Whilst she has returned to the University of the Philippines to take up her Lectureship position once again and build a Landscape Ecology lab, I am taking a moment to remember the trip we did in January 2024.

The Philippines are a fantastic place to visit, for research and eating purposes. And the countryside is absolutely amazing. If you fancy researching mangrove restoration, agroforestry, Philippines crocodile rehabilitation and forest conservation – there are wonderful opportunities: just reach out to Jelaine and start a conversation: jlgan@up.edu.ph.

As this was funded as engagement and impact activity, which has now resulted in a MOU between Newcastle University and the University of the Philippines, we held a student masterclass on predictive mapping and modelling at the University of the Philippines, gave a seminar, help a GIS training workshop up north for staff at Mabuwaya Foundation and visited agroforestry farmers. That visit has informed a lot of the recent agroforestry research plans in the lab, which we are hoping to explore jointly with partners in the Philippines.

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Pathways to sustainability conference

Posted on 29th August 2024 by Marion

Eleanor presented her work on the evidence for participatory forest restoration in projects, globally, at the recent PECS-III conference (Pathways to Sustainability), Montreal, August 12th to 15th 2024. Co-Organised by Resilience Alliance. PECS-3: Pathways to Sustainability (fourwaves.com)

Here are her slides, synthesizing her manuscript, recently published in Environmental Evidence: Existing evidence on the use of participatory scenarios in ecological restoration: a systematic map | Environmental Evidence | Full Text (biomedcentral.com)

Durrant_1508_S23_2024_PresentationDownload
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How birds can help farms and forests in the Philippines

Posted on 19th July 2024 by Marion

Brilliant PhD candidate Jelaine Gan has been developing some cool comics, in collaboration with Jessica Stutman. Printed for engagement with local communities in her field study sites (pdf: in Filipino , in English). The work highlights the functional role of birds in rural landscapes, spreading forest tree see and thus facilitating natural forest regeneration. Want to help birds move through the landscapes? Think about tree perches, artificial or not. We share the comics here for wider reach and because the artwork is too great to miss. For more details on her project: Jelaine Gan | TROPS – TROPical landScapes (ncl.ac.uk)

BirdsReforestation_Comic_Fil-2Download
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Trees on farms – agroforestry research at Newcastle University

Posted on 18th July 2024 by Marion

Since a couple of years, we have been following the establishment of our agroforestry trial plot, Cockle Park (Agriculture Facilities | School of Natural and Environmental Sciences | Newcastle University (ncl.ac.uk)), A mixture of tree lines comprising poplar and willow trees (biomass tree crops) and annual crops (bean, wheat), we are using this trial to demonstrate proof of concept for method innovations – helping us to address pressing research questions and closing knowledge and data gaps.

Project webpage: Agroforestry research at Newcastle University | TROPS – TROPical landScapes (ncl.ac.uk)

What are some of our questions:

Do trees negatively impact yield?
Do trees buffer livestock from heat stress?
Do trees increase biodiversity?
How do trees grow in farmed land?
Do we want trees on farms?

What do we do: Measuring tree health, Monitoring microclimate benefits and costs of trees neighbouring crops, using terrestrial laser scanners and other remote sensing tools to measure and map health and structure of plants, assessing crop yield changes in response to trees on farms, biodiversity assessments, and identifying opportunities and constraints for scaling.

Full booklet here detailing above research activities: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q0l98ds-DW-OPH_LcZrZ9jj_HsskiQ-Y/view?usp=sharing

We do run outreach events to update everyone who is interested in what answers we have found to above questions – so look out for events here: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/farms/

Presenting at our most recent event – Yorkshire Show: Look forward to seeing you at the next one.

June2024_PosterDownload
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Agroforestry adoption UK

Posted on 31st October 2022 by Marion

Policy recommendations

have a look at the most recent outputs from our agroforestry UK project. We have synthesized key findings into a policy brief (thank you @Eleanor Moore for the amazing leadership on this) .

Policy-brief-_05-09-003Download

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Highlighting our recent work on agroforestry adoption in the north of England.

Posted on 17th September 2022 by Marion

Agroforestry – Press Office – Newcastle University (ncl.ac.uk)

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Teaching & Training

Posted on 24th June 2020 by Marion

As a group, we are leading on and contributing to several courses teaching at UG and PG level at Newcastle University. We supervise and offer projects on topics we research on and are happy to help you organise an international student research project for your final dissertation. If you choose one of our key research landscapes for your dissertation project: even better. For links to the key courses we contribute to: https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/marionpfeifer/t-t/teaching/

If you are interested in the degree programmes that we contribute at Newcastle University: drop us an email or DM on twitter. @marion_pfeifer.

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Updates from the team

Posted on 4th December 2019 by Marion

(1) Visitors to the team: Daniel Da Silva is visiting from the Regional University of Blumenau in Brazil. He will work with us and colleagues from the wider research group (Modelling, Evidence and Policy) to do some complex system modelling of forest structure data collected from more than 300 plots across forest regions in Brazil. He will also do some exciting mapping with us. We look forward to sharing the canopy structure maps he will produce through papers and presentations next year.

(2) Field work: Laura has gone and returned from Gabon bringing back with her a ton of mammal images collected by her set of camera traps. She also joined the Agrisys Tanzania field team for the field work inception phase in the Kilombero Valley. She set up some more camera traps to allow us identifying mammal:crop interactions in the landscape, and more importantly provided training in the set-up and use of camera traps to our RAs. Thank you

(3) Our UG students have returned from Peru and will be presenting, today, on their research projects and more importantly on the exciting adventures they had in Peru. This will take place tonight at the great North Museum, Newcastle Upon Tyne (06/12).

(4) The head of the Tropical Landscapes lab has travelled to Ghent to attend Sruthi Moore’s defence of her excellent PhD thesis on ‘potential of terrestrial laser scanning for studying liana : tree interactions’. Whilst there, Marion also gave a seminar talk on the ‘monitoring of natural capital and biodiversity in human-modified tropical landscapes’.

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Four UG students in Peru

Posted on 6th September 2019 by Marion

Four group members (UG students at NU) recently ventured into the untouched forests of Peru Manu NP to look for jaguars with camera traps, analyse vegetation indicators of disturbance and measure spatial point patterns in fig tree species. Thank you to Royal Geographic Society and NU for funding.

Projects: Lauen Barnes – Herbivores and palms: testing for Janzen-Connell effect’; Jennifer McFarlane ‘Habitat use of Jaguars using camera traps in Cocha Cashu biological station, Peru’, Lydia Crabtree ‘Spatial distribution patterns of strangling figs’; Alexandra Lowe ‘Where the palms are – mapping palms as indicators of previous disturbance’.

Check @laurenabarnes_ for more details. For some snapshots sent across by them, see below.

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Visiting Geography at University of Zurich, Switzerland

Posted on 8th May 2018 by Marion

Early mornings are dreadful, no matter how often one practices the ‘set alarm at 3:50 am, get up, fall into clothes, fall into cab, try to hold a polite conversation with lovely taxi driver, join the queues at the security lanes,… greedily grab the coffee at the nearest Costa outlet (or whatever these coffee outlets at airports are called).’

However, the flight was great. The sun was shining. The city run like an organised (and I mean very very organised) clock work. And the campus was super pretty. Even better, my hosts at http://www.geo.uzh.ch/en/studying/spez_master/remote_sensing.html, Hendrik and Felix, just received a cool little new terrestrial Lidar device produced by Leica. Almost tiny, in sleek design: such a beauty

https://leica-geosystems.com/products/laser-scanners/scanners/blk360

The talk went well, and I used the time to relay my views on where we are and where we need to be when using remote sensing for monitoring towards Aichi Targets and SDGs. Thank you again for inviting me!

To download the talk: click Zurich – Presentation.

 

 

 

 

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