Eva Sharpe, HE Policy Officer at the Society of Biology, discovers an excellent resource from the Royal Geographical Society
Recently we asked our members working in Higher Education what else we can do to support the bioscience learning and teaching community. One suggestion was for us to set up a database of fieldwork centres available to hire, providing information on the facilities and the locality. We thought this was an excellent idea, and I looked into what setting this up would involve. Through my investigating, I came across the World Register of Field Centres run by the Royal Geographical Society.
Looking through this register, this is exactly what our members had been describing, and so rather than duplicating effort, we would much rather publicise this excellent existing resource to the bioscience community. The database is well maintained by the Royal Geographical Society, and features 125 entries for UK field centres, as well as 600 other locations around the world. The register covers small independent field camps to large international facilities, and you can search by location and by biome, with the results providing a detailed description of the centres and contact details. Whether you are looking for a coastal centre in Conwy, or an Australian alpine experience, there is plenty to be found on this site.
It would be great for this resource to be widely used by biologists, so if you’re looking for new ideas for field trips, I recommend taking a look. The site also allows you to suggest sites for inclusion on the database here so it’s worth submitting field work centres that you know of that aren’t already featured, to make the database as useful as possible to the bioscience community.