CROPSS – Inspiring biology students to consider careers in crop protection

A couple of years ago, the BBSRC decided to scrap one of their most successful and inclusive PhD training awards, the iCASE.    In their own words, BBSRC will no longer operate an annual competition for industrial CASE (iCASE) studentships, instead allocating the majority of these studentships to the BBSRC Doctoral Training Partnerships (DTP) for awarding alongside their standard studentships.    At one fell stroke the BBSRC reduced the diversity of their PhD portfolio by a significant amount and also dealt a huge blow to those of us working in crop protection, at a time when food security and the need to feed the world is of paramount importance.  Later that year the BBSRC, possibly in response to those of us who kicked up a public fuss about the loss of the iCASE scheme came up with a very inadequately funded scheme called STARS aimed at getting undergraduates interested in some of the vulnerable skill sets that the BBSRC by their actions had made even more vulnerable.  Despite the paltry amount of money available I felt that I had to apply, if only because having complained about lack of funding it would show lack of commitment to the cause 🙂  I duly applied putting forward an application to run a one week crop protection summer school for fifteen students a year for three years.  I was successful and last week we ran our first CROPSS Summer School here at Harper Adams University.  We particularly targeted first and second year undergraduates doing biology and ecology courses at other universities with little or no agricultural content in their degrees.  Our participants came from the universities of Bath, Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Liverpool and Swansea, and apart from one student who came from a farming family, they had no previous experience of agriculture, let alone crop protection.

The Summer School started on Sunday afternoon, with an introduction from me about why crop protection was important and how Integrated Pest Management is all about ecology, NOT spraying and eradication, something I have been banging on about for many years 🙂  This needs to be reiterated again and again and as loudly as possible. We then had an excellent dinner and I took them all to the bar where I cruelly subjected them to a Pub Quiz, all picture rounds.  The first round was all about charismatic megafauna (almost all answered correctly), then dog breeds (about 75% correct), then common British wild flowers (about 60% correct), common British trees (40% correct), common British insects (30% correct), I think you can see where I am going with this  🙂

The week was divided up between agronomy, entomology, nematology, plant pathology, weed science and spray technology, with a mixture of lectures, field work and laboratory work.  In the evening we had guest speakers from the different crop protection sectors, from the agrichemical industry through to government, our last speaker being the Chief Plant Health Officer, Nicola Spence.  The external speakers had been asked to explain how they had ended up in their current positions and to talk about careers in those areas.  I was very impressed with the willingness of the students to engage with the speakers and the questions they asked were extremely discerning.

We were very lucky to be blessed with excellent weather and the Harper Adams University Catering Department came in for very high praise indeed 🙂  apparently our catering is much better than at the universities represented by our delegates.

As the old adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words…..

Catching insects in the Natural England plots

Sorting pitfall traps catches

Plant pathology in the brand new labs

Heading off with John Reade to sample weeds

Enjoying the sun and spotting weeds

Simon Woods from the Engineering Department explaining the fine points of knap sack sprayers

Andy Cherrill extolling the joys of motorised suction sampling

Enjoying the bar with one of the guest speakers, Neal Ward

All in all, we all had a good time, and if you don’t believe me here are some of the responses from the student feedback

The students were great, enthusiastic, engaged and we really enjoyed the course and are very much looking forward to seeing a new CROPSS cohort next year.

Finally, for those of you interested, here is the timetable of the week:

 

Pick and mix 9 – a few links to click

Links to things I thought might grab your fancy

Interested in plants?  Find the latest State of the World’s Plants report here

Butterfly lovers?  Special issue of Journal of Insect Conservation devoted to butterfly conservation

Communicating entomology through video

Speaking of which, I did one on aphids once upon a time 🙂

How bees see may help us develop better cameras

How bumblebee flight may help us develop better drones

The Sixth Mass Extinction of vertebrates on the way but what about all the invertebrates that keep the world functioning?

Interesting article on insect symbolism in 19^th Century British art

Weirdly interesting art based on the “natural world” by Katie McCann

This account of sexism in academia shocked and horrified m

My Bête Noire – The Journal of Vertebrate (oops sorry, Animal) Ecology

Back in 2014 I took the Journal of Animal Ecology to task for pretty much ignoring most of the animal world and publishing almost exclusively vertebrate papers.  Ken Wilson their Editor-in-Chief decided to check up on this claim and to his chagrin, found that I was right in my assertion 🙂

As a loyal subscriber to the print copy of the journal I am very aware of the front cover photograph and have had two occasions this year to publicly praise the journal for their invertebrate-themed covers.  Then I received the July issue which despite having an invertebrate themed In Focus article, featured a leopard as their poster animal.   Although I love cats, I feel that the mega-cats, and the other so-called large charismatic mega-fauna do ecology as a whole, and entomology in particular, a great deal of harm. They suck away much-needed funds and bright capable students into an area that is vastly over-supplied with resources that could be much more profitably used elsewhere, i.e. the study of our planet’s dominant animal inhabitants, the invertebrates.

Journal of Animal Ecology cover images 2017

 My first reaction to the leopard picture was to go through my shelves and look at all the front covers of the journal since they adopted the new size and format, to see how biased (I automatically assumed that they would be) they were towards vertebrates.   I was not surprised, there was indeed a very strong vertebrate bias.

Journal of Animal Ecology front covers, 2009-2016

Just over 80% of the covers had a vertebrate subject; taxonomically they break down to 50% mammals, 20% birds and 11% fish.   Considering the true species composition of the known number of vertebrates, mammals (less than 0.5% of described animal life, about 5 500 species) are vastly over-represented to say the least.  Fish people should be particularly incensed 🙂

Relative proportions of described animal life.  Fish as the most speciose vertebrate group get a picture 🙂  I apologise to any nematologists who might be reading this post 🙂

So what about the journal content, has editorial policy change since 2014 and how are the invertebrates doing?  Ken stated in his blog that taxonomically speaking the papers published in Journal of Animal Ecology were approximately, 30% bird, 26% mammal, 12% fish and 20% insect related. I did a quick count of the papers published in 2015 and 2016.  Things are changing, birds and mammals are down (24% and 22% respectively) and fish are on the up (17%), but vertebrates still account for 67% of papers published in the last two years. Although the journal is still very vertebrate biased that is a definite improvement, but still not back to the glory days of the 1970s,  Nevertheless, well done Ken and colleagues.  Progress is being made (whether deliberately or not) to redress the balance, but still much more is needed to put invertebrates in the lead where they deserve to be.   More insect front covers would surely be easy enough to implement and help reinforce the message that insects and other invertebrates are where most of real world ecology is to be found.  Over to you Ken 🙂

 

Post script

I always feel a bit guilty about taking the Journal of Animal Ecology to task, because when compared with the Journal of Zoology,  JAE are paragons of virtue in regard to publishing invertebrate papers but I guess that as a long-standing member of the British Ecological Society I feel a somewhat more proprietorial interest 🙂

Pick and mix 8 – another pick from the mix

Links to some interesting stuff – well I thought so anyway

 

An interesting idea of how scientists might reach politicians using Twitter

Similarly, Trump, Brexit and a crisis of participation in universities

For those of you interested in the press coverage of the UK General Election, an analysis of the newspaper coverage.  I guarantee that you will be surprised as to which were the two most impartial papers.

Once upon a time we had the milk lake and the butter mountain, but now a butter shortage means bad news for croissant lovers in France

According to the Financial Times, a lot of companies are interested in starting companies to produce and market insects as food

A post by one of my former students @annaplatoni, about her bee work

On why you shouldn’t be dismissive of the “dead grandmother” excuse

Inspiring young Victorians to enjoy entomology through sport

Seven visions of London as a National Park City

I very seldom recommend anything about birds this article about the shape of bird eggs is worth reading just for the graphics