and the plot (of deforestation) thickens

Mexican drug cartels, Salvadoran drug gangs and Chinese-backed illegal loggers disturb my sleep, -said the scarlet macaw.

Check out this report on Yale's environment 360 (and bookmark this site while you're at it).

In the Land of the Maya, A Battle for a Vital Forest

Asantewaa reporting from Tropentag

Check out this brief but interesting interview with Eduardo Somarriba (link to CATIE site), that our very own reporter extraordinaire Asantewaa (currently in Bangor) conducted on Agroforestry, during her visit to the 2012 Annual Conference on Tropical and Subtropical Agricultural and Natural Resource Management (TROPENTAG). Consider this great conference in your itinerary...just ask Asantewaa about it...

Dr. Shivaji Chavan

Recently arriving from India, Dr. Shivaji Chavan is a new SUTROFOR scholar visiting Bangor. Upon mentioning the possibility of interacting with him, he was quick to welcome us and generously offered to share his expertise with all SUTROFOR students. Of course it´s a bit easier for us here at Bangor, so we're planning to meet with him next week to explore some formal and informal possibilities. He´s basically open to suggestions and eager to contribute and collaborate...awesome! and of course this is not limited to students in Bangor, as he mentions:

"I may be of help in technically advising students on various aspects of research with reference to Research Projects and Dissertations. I may coordinate all the support required if some students are interested in pursuing research work anywhere in India."

I attach below his CV and a document with topics in which he has gained considerable experience in the last 30 years. Please have a look at them (especially those of us meeting him next wednesday).


Shivaji Chavan CV

Topics of expertise


cheers

the link between popcorn and agroforestry

a good film to enjoy

"Agroforestry"

and then check out the rest of the

Green Up Film Festival

with a good selection of docs

and streaming access for free

(maybe we should do a movie night here at Bangor)

What are forest graduates doing now?

For everybody interested in the forest jobs market this publication from 2008 may be of some use. It gives an overview of the sector opportunities and country specifics for a select few nations. 

What do we know about our graduates? Graduate Analyses for Forest Sciences and related Curricula. 

2010 SILVA Publications 6: Proceedings of the SILVA Conference May 15^th - 17^th 2008 in Copenhagen, Denmark. 
Eds.: P. Schmidt, S. Lewark, N. Strange

Download the full PDF here.

International Alliance of Research Universities - Global Summer Program

If anybody is looking to gain more valuable experience once the SUTROFOR has finished and before they start employment/further studies, maybe this will interest;

IAURU: 'The Global Summer Program (GSP) is a learning experience that connects university students with outstanding peers from around the world. An exciting learning experience for students at ten of the world's leading research-intensive universities. GSP courses are designed for students drawn from IARU member institutions who, through learning together in the classroom, form an international community of young scholars who also learn from and about each other.'

http://www.iaruni.org/global-summer-program/global-summer-program

Darren Brown (current 2nd year SUTROFOR student) took the GSP in 2008. He says; 

"For me it was a great experience to learn in an international  environment, to meet students from other universities and to be able to travel to Singopore for 6 weeks to do it all!"

Copenhagen University is a member institution so there are opportunities for SUTROFOR student to participate in the GSP 2013. Check back in January for more information!

Future Trees Job Opportunity

A potential job opportunity for Bangor SUTROFOR students with the Future Trees Trust

Future Trees Trust: "The work we need a student to help with involves travelling to seven clonal trial sites  and two clonal seed orchards across Britain with one of our researchers and assisting with the growth assessment, data recording and maintenance at each site. As our work on improving other species progresses, we will also require help assessing other trials and we would like to develop long-term relationships with Bangor students and graduates to help us achieve our ambitious objectives."

The job is PAID and flexible! Enquire ASAP as the job was posted in September. For more information see here. 

journal citation reports and plant perennials for soils

So this is something quite useful I just learned that Tim Pagella, a lecturer here at Bangor, introduced us to.

It's the Journal Citation Reports, that basically inform you how well a journal perfoms and allows for an objective evaluation. So you get an idea if the article you are interested in is published in a journal with a strong impact, and in a general way rates the (potential) quality of the article you are about to read. The reports have other uses, looking intro trends in journals, subjects of rising interest, etc. Go and take a look...

Just head for the Web of Knowledge database search engine from your univerity portal, click on the Additional Resources tab and then into the Journal Citation Reports. Look for a specific journal or a group by subject category, e.g. Forestry, then check out its stats like impact factor or total cites among other. Obviously, more prestigious and broader themed journals like Science have a higher score than those more specialized like Agroforestry Systems. It's just a tool, but a pretty useful one: You might think twice before basing your arguments on a reference from a journal that is not much read or cited by peers.

And by the way, you definitely want to look into a recent comment in Nature (which has a very high impact factor in the Journal Citation Reports) that argues for integrating trees with food crops to restore soils and increase staple yield in Africa, a.k.a. Agroforestry !

Does REDD+ avoid illegal logging?

To enhance the discussion about REDD+, find below a link of a UNEP's report about illegal logging.

http://rona.unep.org/documents/news/Green_Carbon_Black_Trade_Final%20PR.pdf