“It’s nice to be part of something bigger”: Meet the Biodiversity Interns for Summer 2024

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Friday 14 June 2024

The biodiversity interns have made an instagram (@st.andrews_wildlife) showcasing the behind-the-scenes of their biodiversity monitoring and also providing information on local flora and fauna. Give them a follow!

From left to right: Jack, Em, Eve and Lydia

At first glance, Em, Lydia, Eve and Jack seem like they’re running a military operation. A large map of St Andrews has been pinned up on the wall, with little markers pressed all around it. Every so often a small orange post it note has been stuck onto the paper, carefully labelling areas around campus.

Each small zone marked is a green area where the interns monitor biodiversity at various times of day as part of their summer research internship. They are tasked with carefully noting all the plants, birds, moths, and insects that they see each expedition.

The room at the back of transition where they are based, affectionately term the “bat cave” is a hive of activity. One of them meticulously records any data gathered, whilst the other three plan their next outing, discussing timings. They’re rarely in the office, spending most of their time out recording data in various parts of St Andrews. They all wear casual clothes and carry waterproof jackets, prepared for anything that Scottish weather can throw at them.

Unlike other sustainability summer internships, such as Emma’s Meadows in the Making one, the group isn’t run as part of Transition or the Environment Team. They’re managed by Professor Will Cresswell in the School of Biology, who is interested in ecological conservation as well as biodiversity. The data gathered by the interns shows the university how they’re doing with biodiversity, and how close they are to their goal for 60% of their land to be managed to promote biodiversity by 2035.

The experience helps the students on the programme as well. Having data gathering and fieldwork on the CV massively helps them to find jobs in biology and conservation after university, if that’s what they wish to do.

Read below to find out more about the process of internship and the university’s action plan, as well as ways that you can help to promote biodiversity!

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INTERVIEW BELOW

Tell me about yourselves.

Lydia: I’m Lydia, I’m going into fourth year studying a general biology degree and I’m from Staffordshire.

Eve: I’m Eve, I’m going into my fourth year. I do ecology and conservation and I’m from the Lake District.

Em: I’m Em. I’m going into fourth year philosophy and anthropology. I’m also from Staffordshire in a weirdly similar area to Lydia!

Did you guys know each other before?

Em and Lydia: Nope!

How crazy!

Jack: I’m Jack and I’m from South London, and I’ve just done my third year studying ecology and conservation.

Great! I guess my first question is for you guys is what scheme is your biodiversity internship on? How is it structured and what do you do as part of it?

Jack: I think one of the biggest things that differentiates what we’re doing from a lot of other internships is the lack of structure. We have a goal and as long as we complete that our hours don’t really matter. We generally try and work nine to five, but it really depends on what we’re doing. If we’re doing moth traps then that starts at ten pm and then we have to collect it before four am.

Lydia: So, it’s very weird hours sometimes!

So, what do you guys monitor on the internship?

Eve: Basically, our aim is to create a map of all the biodiversity on university land. That’s mostly plants and vegetation at the moment, but the aim is to do a lot more moth surveys and bat surveys and birds as well.

Lydia: So at the moment we’ve mainly done vegetation. It’s mainly going out and we’ll see a plant that we know and put a point down on a map on our phones and then we’ll upload it onto the computer.

Jack: That’s what this is!

Lydia: so each one of those points is a plant or a bird or a moth.

Did you guys know each other before starting the scheme or did you meet each other whilst on it?

Lydia: I didn’t know Em–

Em: No one knows me!

Lydia: But we all took the same modules.

Eve: Yeah, the other five of us all know each other from biology.

What appealed to you guys about doing a project– or I guess for many of you a degree– involving biodiversity? What interests you about biodiversity as a topic?

Eve: I mean for starters, it was advertised as an internship where every day would be outside. It would be a practical thing. I think that, I can only speak for myself, but that really appealed to me and I think some of the others as well. It was also a great opportunity to learn some identification skills.

Lydia: We’ve all got a lot better at identifying things over the past few weeks.

I can imagine! What are some of the ways that ordinary students can get involved in biodiversity projects here at St Andrews?

Jack: Transition are quite good at doing stuff, but we’ve found, as biology students specifically, it’s quite difficult knowing what’s there and what’s available. A lot of stuff I think we’ve only really discovered in the last few months as third years and we really wish we’d known about it earlier.

So, you think that more needs to be done to make people aware?

Lydia: It’s not advertised enough with all the projects going on.

Jack: Actually in the last few days we’ve started our own Instagram. It’s not great at the moment, but the aim is hopefully for it to be a place which is a bit more of a hub for these opportunities. At the moment, it kind of feels like you’ve got transition, the university of st Andrews sustainability page…

Lydia: also St Andrews environmental network.

Jack: it’s very diffused.

Lydia: And then there’s also the places outside of the university as well like Fife and Kinross countryside trust and all of those places, because they’ve all got volunteering opportunities and all sorts all the time but again obviously because they’re not university affiliated the university doesn’t tell people about those.

Jack: We made a point of the page not being uni affiliated, it’s very much St Andrews town rather than gown, because that closes a lot of doors.

It sounds like a really good idea.

Jack: Yeah, we’ll see how it goes!

I’m sure it’ll be great! My next question is if there’s any way to access the work you’ve been doing with the map? Is it all on a hard drive or is there a website that students can look up?

Jack: to my knowledge, no, but Em, you might know more.

Em: There is a VIP (Vertically Intergrated Project) for a biodiversity literacy website, I did that last semester. I was doing similar things, setting up the map and software and the plan of what we’re doing this summer. They have a website about the process and the map. I think they have last years map on it as well.

What’s your favourite thing you’ve seen so far on your internship?

Lydia: The deer. The deer by the North Haugh pond, which I didn’t know were there at all until I saw them whilst monitoring stuff.

Eve: Or the frogs by the pond as well! A lot of the best things are by the North Haugh pond.

I’ll keep an eye out next time I’m there!

Jack: Also I think, for me, the badgers around town. I don’t think many people know that we have them and we have a lot of badgers, relatively to other places. For me personally, it was another reason to start the Instagram because we actually had one of the oldest badger setts in Scotland on North Haugh. However, now it’s no longer active because of activity that the university has done, which is a shame. But that was there and very few people knew about it. We’ve done a lot of work with camera traps around town, so there’s been a lot of fleeting glimpses of deer on that and quite a lot of other cool stuff.

Can you explain what a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is and why they’re so important for tracking biodiversity?

Em: It’s a way of creating a number that quantifies how biodiversity is doing overall in the uni land per year. It uses the data we’re gathering–all of the species that we plot on the map–it takes that to get a score of species richness, so how many different species there are within each small portion of land. Then, for each section you take that and then the area of it and the quality of the habitat and put it into an equation. That then comes out with scores for how “good” it is biodiversity-wise. We have the score for last year which was the first time the project ran which has set us baseline and hopefully this year we’ll be able to see broadly whether it’s got better or worse. It’s mostly for the university to see how they’re doing.

And how is the university doing on their biodiversity objectives?

Em: I guess we don’t technically know because we’ve only got last years score: so this year we’ll see whether it’s got better or worse. But I do feel as though the university isn’t doing enough.

Jack: Yeah, one of the biggest things is that when we spoke to people out and about is the concern that the university might use what we’re doing and boil it down to one number and try and offset it somehow. I know they’re planning to build on the North Haugh, which currently the largest green space in town outside of the pond. I’m concerned that they might build on that and then plant a field and fill it with plants so that the score can go up. Even though biologically that’s not necessarily significant, but of course Em knows better than me the equation that goes into calculating KPI and stuff.

So definitely more to be done then.

Em: they can definitely try to cheat the system.

What are some of the biggest threats facing wildlife in both St Andrews and across the country?

Jack: I think develop and urbanisation is probably the biggest one, especially in St Andrews, where I don’t think they plan on stopping growing the town any time soon.

Eve: I think another one is there’s also a lot of non-native species. Bees aren’t doing too great and non-native species aren’t good for them.

If development poses a significant threat, how do we develop our towns and cities– because we do need more housing– whilst integrating in biodiversity initiatives?

Jack: I mean there’s no one answer but I think planning things longer term will help with that. Integrating wildlife corridors into the structure of roads will help, that’s more of a long-term thing. I know that when they build the road up to Madras School ( they put in a tunnel underneath which they hoped would help. But what they ended up doing with that road is cutting quite a major wildlife corridor at the time into two separate things, and a lot of the stuff that the camera traps are doing is trying to figure out if badgers and other animals are still using that corridor. I think going into building projects with the future in mind rather than just the immediate issues is really quite important.

Em: Yeah, if people build on brownfield land and in the process of developing also regenerate biodiversity as well, that would be good. It doesn’t have to be either or, but profit incentive means that people only really want to build on land that they don’t have to do anything to.

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Interesting. Would you recommend the biodiversity monitoring internships? Has it been helpful for you?

Lydia: Yeah definitely. I feel like we’ve all really improved our identification skills, and we’ve learnt a lot about the university and university land. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Eve: It’s nice to be part of something bigger than you, one that’s going to continue. Will, who’s in charge of it, wants it to keep it going for as long as possible. So it’s quite nice to be part of a long-term project, especially because we’re only the second summer that’s done it, so we’re still having quite a major influence on how it’s going to work technically and method-wise.

What’s on thing you wish people knew or understood better about biodiversity?

Jack: I think its importance. I think that for a lot of people it’s a buzzword and it’s just a thing that people hear but it’s necessarily something that’s fully understood. The consequences of not having biodiversity is sometimes lost on people. Especially if you grow up in a big city or town, people are going to become less connected with nature, so they won’t be able to see the consequences of not having it.

Okay, so I guess we should end on a bit more of a high note! What are some of the changes ordinary people can make to promote biodiversity?

Em: Let your grass grow really long!

Jack: Yeah, don’t cut your grass and plant good flowers. If you’ve got a garden or a green space and it’s yours, make the most of it, try and plant native species that are going to help local insects and stuff.

Eve: Wildflowers especially.

Lydia: And also alerting authorities if there’s invasive non-native species as well.

Jack: Which we have a lot of.

Lydia: And when volunteering days do come up to help get rid of them, helping out with getting rid of non-native species.

How can you tell if something’s a non-native species? For example, I haven’t done anything on plant identification, I stopped doing biology when I was 16. Is there an app or something that can help you tell whether it’s native or not?

Lydia: I don’t things there’s a specific app that tells you if it’s native or not but there’s apps like iNaturalist where you can take a picture of a plant and it tells you what it is and where it’s supposed to be from. I don’t know if anyone else know of anything?

Em: I don’t of any specific apps but I guess if you know a few of the most common species and take some time to figure out what they look like that can help.

Jack: A good rule is that most things that are growing en masse are kind of a red flag. Like Hogweed

Eve: Or Balsam

Jack: Or aliums! Like if you go to St Mary’s and beneath the flowers if you look on the ground it’s all the same species of wild garlic which isn’t good.

Lydia: Japanese Knotweed, that’s another one.

Jack: And rhododendrons as well in the UK.

Thank you so much guys, it was fantastic to speak to you.

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