Life on land

While we fight for the last grain to survive, the Higaonon tribe – a group of indigenous peoples in the remote mountain villages of Bukidnon, Philippines – have lived for centuries utilising the plant resources in their ancestral land. These resources play an essential role in the resilience of the Higaonon tribal community.

The Independent Research Fund Denmark – Social Sciences has granted DKK 2,7 mill. to Postdoc Paul Austin Stacey, Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University. Illegally accessed resources comprise an expanding, billion-dollar sector in many sub-Saharan African countries. The new project is focusing on illegal gold mining in Ghana.

Meet the Ecuadorian scientist who defied machismo-culture in the academic world in Ecuador, to study thoroughly a big passion for her – climate change and its effects on her native mountain region and in the end the water supply in the country.

There are many opportunities for European and non-European students to travel around in Europe and in the world to meet other students and different realities. DDRN university intern, Dori Zantedeschi, joined the ELLS conference 2019 for life science students in Uppsala, Sweden, Here she introduces the conference and interviews three non-European students. 

In November 2019, I was In Uppsala for the ELLS Student Conference (see article), organized by Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Ultuna campus. On the second and last day of the conference, I went to Danilo Crispim Massuela’s poster presentation. I like poster presentation, because the atmosphere is more familiar since you stand all around the poster and the presenter.

The first time I spoke to Dr. Expedito Nuwategeka was on the telephone. In my mind I saw the image of a 60-year old man sitting on a wooden chair with piles of books at his table. However, that is not the image I arrived to at Gulu University on an April afternoon to meet him.

The Colombian hydroclimatologist Daniel Ruíz Carrascal is one out of only three IPCC authors from Colombia. He has dedicated his life to studying climate change, especially in the mountains and the páramos (the moorlands). And he is worried about the future - he doesn’t have a clue what will happen with those fast and important changes.

Meet a Colombian scientist, passionately researching about the pink river dolphin, a crucial species to protect aquatic ecosystems in the Amazon. The enormous habitat of those border-crossing dolphins makes them a key-species to protect big areas. If they are well, so is the Amazon. And when the Amazon is on fire, it affects species like the dolphin, as well.

Meet the Ecuadorian palm-expert who has dedicated almost twenty years of his career to specialize in this plant-family which is widely popular – for conservation and industrial purpose. Just in Ecuador there are 140 palm species – and this man knows to distinguish them all.

Once dry tropical forests in Ecuador were common ecosystems. Now there is only eight % left of this type of forest, which has had the bad luck to compete with the most invasive of all species: The humans. Meet the Ecuadorian scientist who has specialized in the dry tropical forests.

Danish support to research in Ecuador has contributed to document the mega biodiversity in the national park of YASUNI – the biggest in the country, the most famous – and also by far the most controversial national park – maybe even in the South American continent.

At Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (PUCE), a large university in Quito, the capital of Ecuador, one of the leading researchers, Hugo Navarrete, recalls the support by Danish colleagues during his early career in tropical biology.