News

SE@K student Alex Diana doing field work!

First year student Alex Diana and his supervisor, Dr Eleni Matechou, took part in field work sampling for newts.

The long-running project, coordinated by the Durrell Institute for Conservation and Ecology (DICE) at the University of Kent, collects data on newt populations breeding in ponds located near the Canterbury campus.

They saw and identified male and female great crested, palmate and smooth newts. They also learned where newts place their eggs and what male newts do to attract the females (thanks to a very vivid description by Professor Richard Griffiths from DICE!)

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Conferences/Meetings/Workshops

SE@K students run masterclasses for SMSAS

Three SE@K students (Ming, Marina and Alex) took part in masterclasses organised by the SMSAS outreach officer, Joe Watkins. For details about master classes and other outreach events at SMSAS see here https://www.kent.ac.uk/smsas/outreach/on-campus.html.

The classes took place on two days and involved four sessions: i) Introduction to probability and statistics ii) Removal modelling, iii) Occupancy modelling and iv) Capture-recapture modelling. They were attended by some of the most enthusiastic and engaged year 9 students in the local area.

All sessions were interactive and the participating year 9 students had the opportunity to replicate real-life sampling techniques for monitoring populations of lizards, penguins and birds. These involved digging for lizards in the sand, looking for hidden penguins and marking birds. No animals were hurt in the process as they were all made out of plastic!

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