Dr Rachel Seary had secured funding from NERC’s Research Experience Placement scheme for a student to work with her for up to 8 weeks, looking at ‘What drives shipping vessels to slow down for whales?’
Hi Jonathan, thanks for being this month’s Spotlight. Can you introduce yourself and the project you’re working on?
My name’s Jonathan Berry. I’m going into my third year studying BSc Biology at the University of Oxford, and I’m here at DICE for two months on a placement in marine conservation. The project is focused on whales off the coast of California. Here they have Voluntary Speed Reduction zones (VSRs), where ships are encouraged to slow down to lower the likelihood of a whale collision. These VSRs exist globally but in California, ships have complied much more than other areas in recent years. I’m looking into how the media portrays shipping companies to see if public opinion is a factor in this compliance.
What drew you to this placement at DICE?
I’ve been interested in going into a career in conservation and was in communication with some people at the Leverhulme Centre at Oxford. They emailed me suggesting this placement would be worth going for and when I read it, I felt it would be really interesting. It seemed like DICE had a really modern approach to conservation; this placement was very relevant to the future of conservation, in terms of its focus on the role of media in influencing how likely individuals and corporations are to take sustainable action, but also helping to understand science and policy. The placement seemed like a great opportunity to get to know the field more.
What have been some standout moments from your time at DICE?
The most exciting thing has been how interconnected DICE is as a department. Not only does that mean a lovely atmosphere to work in but it’s great to be able to learn about each other’s research. It’s been exciting hearing about the different projects staff are undertaking, where they’re going.
At the start of the placement, it was great to talk with Rachel about how this project fits into DICE’s work as a whole and the wider implications for California – thinking about how there’s this broader network I’m contributing to. It was also cool to find out that this project was kickstarted with funds from NASA.
What are your biggest takeaways?
It’s hard to summarise because I feel like I’ve learned so many different lessons. Academic collaboration is very useful – knowing people within the field and having discussions with people. Someone in DICE had already done some semantic analysis for human-wildlife interactions and that became transferrable to some of our later work. We had discussions with other academics who talked to us about how they conducted their analysis, which helped streamline the process for us. I’m really grateful for the department and for Rachel as a supervisor. Rachel secured funding for me to go to a conference, which is something you can’t always do at the stage that I’m at, so I’m really grateful for that. This placement has helped me not only understand where I want to go with my future career, but also build the experience required for that so that I’m effective when I reach that level and I’m more likely to succeed.
_
Read more about marine conservationist Dr Rachel Seary.