Naomi Lock - Countryside Management

 As part of our course assignment we needed to complete a presentation to present to the class. Firstly we agreed on some criteria for marking each others presentations using a number system ranging from Poor to Very Good. (See Table 1 below).  We also agreed that each presentation should be approximately three minutes long.     Table 1 : Example of the marking criteria table used.  Name:                                                                                  Topic: Criteria 1 – Poor 2- 3 4 5 – Very good Speaking clearly           Professional format in the presentation     ...

 A breakdown of the hours of work experience. Date. Work Experience Hours completed Oct 2020 Mammal App 3 hrs Dec 2020 Conservation Day – Cumbria Wildlife 6 hrs Feb 2021 Backyard Bird Count 8 hrs Jan / Feb 2021 Zooniverse 33 hrs Jan/ Feb 2021 The Lakes Plastic Collective – Litter Picking 10 hrs                                                      TOTAL: 60 hrs   Overall Reflection:  It has been difficult to find work experience due to ongoing Covid 19 restrictions and lockdowns, with most Conservation an...

Hours to date: 60 hours (complete) 10 hours - Litter picking.  'The Lakes Plastic Collective' wasa set up as a response to the amount of litter and rubbish which was being left around the Lake District National Park during this summer. A local walker set up a Facebook page and Instagram account to highlight the problem and has been encouraging others to help in their local area. When Lockdown was lifted in the Summer weeks, there was a huge influx of visitors and tourists coming to the Lake District and the amount of rubbish increased including camping equipment being left, barbeques and disposable face masks.  As rubbish can cause many problems for wildlife and humans alike I decided to use my last ten hours of  work experience to help them out in my local area by picking up litter when out walking and along my own stretch of road. (See picture 1 & 2). This was completed through Lockdown three so it will be interesting to see how the amount of rubbish increases after...

Total hours to date: 50 hours.    Whilst in Lockdown I have been completing some volunteer online Citizen Science through The Zooniverse website. (33 hours in total)  'What is the Zooniverse? The Zooniverse is the world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research. This research is made possible by volunteers — more than a million people around the world who come together to assist professional researchers. Our goal is to enable research that would not be possible, or practical, otherwise. Zooniverse research results in new discoveries, datasets useful to the wider research community, and many publications.  At the Zooniverse, anyone can be a researcher'   (Zooniverse, 2021)  T hey have many different projects where anyone can be involved, ranging from identifying Dolphin calls, to digitalising important information from Nature Reserves, to viewing video clips of birds nests to identify different behaviour patterns.  I chos...

  Total hours completed to date: 17 hours. Over the last four days I have participated in the Great Backyard Bird Count (Great Backyard Bird Count, 2021) . 8 hrs in total.  This is run by The Cornell Lab of Ornithology based in the USA. Every year they organise a global citizen survey of birds where people from all over the world join in over four days and count, study and log their bird observations.  These findings are used to study migration patterns, year-to-year changes and any long-term trends in bird patterns.  Reflection: Through doing this over the four days I have learnt more about identifying the birds seen in my own backyard, as well as looking at the differences in bird species between countries and even between different areas within Cumbria and the UK. I have processed the data collected and learnt more about how to identify different species which were both areas in my skills audit which I wanted to expand on this year.   Email received from...