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Spreading the word on palaeolimnology and lake restoration
4 July 2021
Helen presents remotely in Brazil and China
The Covid-19 pandemic has killed-off international academic travel to research meetings, but instead hugely accelerated the use of electronic exchange among individuals and research networks.
During this year so far, Professor Helen Bennion has been using these methods to spread the word about NERC Hydroscape, a four-year project started in December 2015 and funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), involving an international consortium of environmental research organisation led by the University of Sterling.
Hydroscape aimed to determine how stressors such as nutrient pollution and climate change drive ecological degradation, and how connectivity between freshwater habitats influences both the dispersal of stressors and biodiversity. Their implications for British freshwaters are currently poorly understood.
Via YouTube, Helen first presented a paper to the 10th International Shallow Lakes Conference, held in Brazil on 1- 5 March 2021, on ‘A Hydroscape approach to assessing the likelihood of restoring lost aquatic macrophyte species’ (with UCL colleagues Ambroise Baker, Carl Sayer, Simon Turner, Viv Jones, and Neil Rose).
Dr Simon Turner, presented another Hydroscape-based paper, with colleagues: Legacy metal pollutants, lake connectivity & food chain metal burdens.
In another ‘remote’ outing, Helen was invited to a workshop on ‘Deep integration of neo- and paleolimnology’, hosted online by a UCL Geography PhD Alumnus, Xuhui Dong, at Guangzhou University, China, in May 2021.
Helen’s presentation, ‘Hydroscape Highlights: history, health and hotspots’, replaced a planned visit to Xuhui's lab in Guangzhou, scheduled during her sabbatical in Spring 2020 which Covid sadly caused to be cancelled (see poster).