24 young conservationists are embarking on the final stage of their TBA field course at Uganda’s Makerere University Biological Field Station. Having spent the first two weeks of the course learning about tropical forest ecology, through workshops and practical exercises, students are now working on their own research projects. They have identified topics to study, thought up questions to investigate, and are now collecting data. This they will analyse and write up as a scientific paper and will present these to the other students and the field station community.
Topics are always very varied. This year they include how fruit feeding butterflies are stratified in the forest, macrofungal diversity, defence strategies in ants, and other topics. For many, this is the first time they have ever worked on these topics – and designed their own research project.
This rich mix of different ways of practical learning is one of the things that makes TBA training so effective.
