Well.. what an exciting week it has been! The Easter holidays are within our reach, the sun is shining and here at Acer Ecology, we held our first Phase 1 Survey Training Course, this year for Cardiff University Society: WILDSOC tutored by Botanical expert, Mark Duffell.
It was great to be working with such an experienced botanist, Mark Duffell. He received nothing but excellent remarks about his teaching throughout the whole course. He taught in an enjoyable but educational way for everyone!
We also really enjoyed working with Cardiff Wildsoc. As previous university students ourselves we know how hard it is to be able to find practical, hands on work experience so its been wonderful to be able to help The Cardiff University Students by providing extra fieldwork and ecological training for them to enhance their skills and their CV. Throughout the course, everyone was eager to learn and also one student found it interesting to even ask each of us about how we ended up in Ecological Consultancy and our experiences.
The course took place at The Bute Park Education Centre, which suitably complimented our phase 1 training with excellent facilities from a spacious classroom workshop to a wide array of botany in the Park for the students to explore.
Mark firstly taught everyone the theory of Phase 1 Surveys from the basics to the surveys that he actually does as an experienced ecologist. Within the feedback, a lot of people found it particularly interesting how Mark referred to his own ecological work and what he would personally do when undertaking a phase 1 survey. Throughout the course, a lot of students expressed an ongoing interest in Ecological Consultancy work which is encouraging to hear! (In a non biased opinion of course!)
Afterwards, the students put their knowledge into practice in groups and mapped out Bute Park Education Centre with the help of ourselves as mentors. It was great being able to help out and share our own experience and knowledge with people who share that same passion for ecology.
The weather throughout the day was glorious which made all our work seem effortless. It was a hard job but somebody had to do it, walking around the park and taking in all its nature and glory.
I think one of our ecologists particularly enjoyed being a mentor to the students throughout the day!
We had a great day overall and thoroughly enjoyed working with Mark Duffell and Cardiff Wildsoc and we would like to thank Wildsoc and Mark Duffell for all their help and for making the course happen and hopefully we will have that pleasure of working with the both of them again very soon!
Be sure to check out our Facebook page for more photos of our Phase 1 Survey day out!
