Oonah Lessware wins student bursary award for 2019

We congratulate Oonah Lessware for winning this year's CNS Student Bursary, awarded in memory of Prof Ursula Henriques and Dr Mary Gillham.

Oonah received her award at the meeting on 11 March 2019 from Mike Dean (photo by Andy Kendall). She delivered a fascinating talk about her fieldwork project looking at the responses of coral reef fish to coral damage.

Oonah Lessware writes:
"An assessment of coral reef fish assemblages and how they may shift towards or away from specialism in response to coral damage, bleaching or death.

The study aimed to gauge the effects that global climate change and therefore coral reef bleaching and mortality will have on reef fish assemblages. The goal was to determine whether the reef fish assemblages will shift towards becoming more generalist or specialist in response to coral damage or death. The reefs in this study were within the Tunku Abdul Rahman Marine park in Sabah Borneo. Species richness and abundance data was collected for both generalist and specialist fish species and areas of varying coral damage and death were sampled. The general findings showed that both generalist and specialist species significantly decreased in abundance and species richness as the amount of coral damage increased."

Photo after a beach clean in the marine park by Oonah Lessware.

Biosciences Prize 2017

Last night (27 March), Eve Treadaway was presented with the Biosciences Prize for 2017, awarded in memory of Prof Ursula Henriques and Dr Mary Gillham, at the last indoor meeting of the CNS winter season.

Eve flew back from Copenhagen where she is currently an Erasmus scholar, to talk to the Society about “Project Noise” - her Cardiff University Biosciences Department student project conducted at the Danau Girang Field Centre in Sabah, Borneo. See the previous post for more about the project, which concerns rainforest bioacoustics.

The evening was completed with a talk by Andy Kendall on the volcanic landscapes and wildlife above and below ground in Lanzarote.

Bioscience Prize winner 2017

We congratulate Eve Treadaway for winning this year's Biosciences Prize. This is our annual student bursary, awarded in memory of past member Ursula Henriques, for the best second-year fieldwork project in the Biosciences faculty at Cardiff University.

She will receive the award at the Cardiff Naturalists' Society meeting on Monday 27 March, when she will also give a presentation of her work entitled "The biological and environmental factors that govern the ‘soundtrack’ of the secondary lowland tropical rainforest surrounding Danau Girang Field Centre", or, for short, 'Project Noise'.

Eve Treadaway writes: 

Project Noise set out to develop a new approach to rainforest bioacoustics, using the extensively described botanic plots of Danau Girang Field Centre, Sabah, Borneo as recording sites. Instead of training bioacoustic work on a particular species or taxonomic group, as is standard practice, this project attempted to record and analyse the bioacoustic product of the ecosystem as a whole, termed here ‘ambient rainforest sound’ (ARS). 

There are numerous interrelated factors that, summed together, result in observed ARS. These can be broadly divided into two groups; biological (i.e. the animal species present at a site) and environmental (i.e. weather, botanic diversity*, time). The aim was to investigate potential relationships both between factors of different groups and of factors within the same group. 

Project Noise was a small first step on the road toward assessing rainforest ecosystem biodiversity and functioning, simply by ‘listening’ to the sound produced. The findings were promising, and more extensive application of the methods employed would enable more powerful statistical analysis and preliminary algorithm design (estimating functioning/biodiversity from acoustic data).

I look forward to sharing Project Noise with the Cardiff Naturalists Society on the 27th of March 2017.

Members Evening 2017

We had a fascinating evening of talks last night 


Al Reeve started the evening talking on the Dr Mary Gillham Archive Project which sEWBREC are running on behalf of all of us who knew Mary

After an introduction to Mary and her career he gave us a full update on where the project has got to working through the approximately 150,000 records that she captured during her life.

he outlined the work as

• 150000 wildlife records to mine out of 20 boxes of assorted papers,
• 14000 slides to digitise (and recover records from),
• 2 unpublished manuscripts to make available digitally,
• an oral record of Mary’s life to create,
• a website, social media presence and blog to create,
• plus biodiversity events, school/community group visits and led walks to organise and run…

As part of the talk and very much after the talk we were able to share our memories of Mary with Al and Pat and they explained how they want to meet with us again and capture this on tape for use in the archive

Further details can be found in a plethora of online services

https://marygillhamarchiveproject.com/
https://www.facebook.com/MaryGillhamArchive/
https://twitter.com/gillhamarchives
https://www.flickr.com/people/marygillhamarchiveproject/


Paul Bowden went next with some excellent pictures of the Birds he had spotted during a trip to California and Arizona. Clearly these are excellent places to visit and Paul has I am sure inspired a few holiday ideas


Eirian Edwards came next with an intriguing talk entitled "Mainly Orchids" where she showed us the range of Orchids that she has been able to see at home in Wales, in the wider UK and around the world. As the title suggested that wasn't all of it as we were treated to a selection of other plants and animals from the places she explored, especially her favourite place Kenfig Burrows


I brought up the rear with a rapid run through some of the places I have been visiting with work over the last few years. On some of those trips I found a brief time to take a walk and see some wildlife like the wonderful Koishikawa Korakuen which is a beautiful landscape garden from the early Edo Period in Tokyo.

Surrounded by buildings such as the Tokyo Dome in the background, it is a real haven

The Moon Bridge

A few other things to note .. the cafe is now open at the university before the meetings take place and we would very much recommend to people that coming early and sharing a coffee etc and having a chat with your friends is a great way to enhance the evening meetings,

It is possible that the sEWBREC team will make use of these times to record some of your memories of Mary Gillham they will let us know

The other speaker for the night that the Cardiff Naturalists Bioscience Prize which we give in honour of Dr Mary Gillham and Professor Ursula Henriques will be myself giving a talk about exploring Lanzarote both above and underground. For those who know me there will be a lot of pictures to hopefully enjoy. The programme is updated with that information

Regards
Andy Kendall

Zoe Melvin wins Bioscience Prize 2015

Bioscience Prize 2015

The Bioscience Prize is awarded annually by Cardiff Naturalists' Society in the memory of former member Prof Ursula Henriques, for the best 2nd-year fieldwork project in the Bioscience Department at Cardiff University. Andy Kendall presented Zoe Melvin with the 2015 award (below) at the CNS meeting on Monday 28 Sept, during which Zoe gave a talk about her project on mosquitoes in Borneo. Zoe has written an article, based on her talk, which will feature in the next CNS newsletter.

 

Social Grooming in Long Tailed Macaque Societies

It is with great pleasure that we announce the winner of the 2013 Cardiff Naturalists Society Biosciences prize awarded in honour of Professor Ursula Henriques

The 2013 winner is Imogen Fox for her work entitled Social Grooming in Long Tailed Macaque Societies (Sabah, Borneo)

Imogen gave a brief presentation to her work to the CNS at a recent meeting where she was given a cheque and a certificate by Mike Dean Secretary of the society

Once again a real credit to university and to her personally, showing the quality of work that can be produced by a person with real enthusiasm for their subject. Once again the society are proud to be supporting excellence in the students at the university


Full Details of the award and information about Professor Henriques can be found Here

Effects of Autochthonous and Allochthonous Primary Production on the Diversity of Invertebrate Feeding Guilds in a River Ecosystem

We are pleased to be able to tell you that the Cardiff Naturalists' Bioscience prize awarded at Cardiff University in honour of Professor Ursula Henriques the 2012 Prize has been awarded to Zigmunds Orlovskis.  Zigmunds is a student from Latvia, and he is an outstanding recipient of the prize.  He was awarded the top mark for his field course report.

Zigmunds being presented with the cheque and certificate by 

Chris Franks, President of the Society

Zigmunds went on a freshwater biology fieldcourse to France.  His project was entitled "Effects of Autochthonous and Allochthonous Primary Production on the Diversity of Invertebrate Feeding Guilds in a River Ecosystem", although he came up with a more user friendly title for the CNS talk!

Zigmunds in very keen on Natural History and has been on a Cardiff Naturalists' outing! which we are very pleased to hear because this prize is intended to encourage the widest possible interest in the natural world and also build a relationship with the student body

After  the presentation he entertained the members with a fascinating presentation with some excellent information, pictures and videos. Once again a real credit to the quality of work that can be produced by a person with real enthusiasm for his subject



Full Details of the award and information about Professor Henriques can be found Here

The Effects of Cleaning Stations on Dark Damselfish Territorial Behaviour & Nova Scotia

Our 2011 Biosciences Prize winner Zalina Bashir Ali gave us an absolutely superb presentation tonight and totally typified the type of excellence that we were hoping would be inspired by our award.

With some superb photographs of the reef animals taken on the Cardiff University Biosciences trip to Tobago she  gave us a very clear description of the work that she had done and the theories that had been considered in her work

Zalina receiving her certificate and award from Mike Dean Secretary of the Cardiff Naturalists Society

Zalina giving her excellent presentation

The Cardiff Naturalists Society is proud to award a prize for the best 2nd year Student fieldwork in memory of our former member Professor Ursula Henriques.

Full Details of the award and information about Professor Henriques can be found Here

Following this talk in lieu of the planned main speaker we had another excellent presentation from Margaret and John Samuel who stepped in at late notice to give us a real insight into an area that few of us have considered visiting, but is a real nature and history lovers paradise

We would like to thank both of our speakers tonight for a most entertaining eventing even if it did not go entirely as planned