TROPS – TROPical landScapes

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.

(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’.

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.

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.

Our PhD student Laura won the prestigious National Geographic Early Career Grant to support her research on road impacts on amphibians and mammals in rainforests. Congratulations!