By Ms Brown, Head of Science

We were delighted to host the first session of ‘The Green STEM Challenge’ – our scientific sustainability project in collaboration with Imperial College and the Grantham Institute last week.  Our Year 12s were joined by students from Drayton Manor High School, Greenford High School and The Cardinal Wiseman School.

Our main speaker was Ariane Dellavalle from Imperial who delivered an excellent talk on ‘Feeding the Planet whilst preserving Biodiversity.’ She also spoke about her route to her current PhD at Imperial (on ‘Evaluating the role that birds play in ecosystem services’) – from Undergraduate, then MSci at the University of Manchester (specialising in ecology and conservation, Masters project in soil ecology); volunteering and degree work with the RSPB, before becoming a field technician in Iceland – showing us the important message that you do not need to specialise early but you should enjoy what you do.  

We discussed what ecosystem services we thought birds might provide – African paradise birdcatcher, common waxbill and Olive sunbird (pest control, spreading seeds in their faeces, pollination of flowers that are too long and narrow for pollination by bees). Ariane has done field work in Zambia to collect birds and then analyse their faeces – to understand, how the birds are distributed, what the birds eat, what ecosystems they provide, measure the birds functional traits (beak dimensions, wing length, body weight and beak shape etc) and understand how these traits relate to ecosystem function.

We were then given the task to identify a way in which food supply chains can be made more sustainable through individual action or system wide action. We then explored why are sustainable agriculture and food supply chains important. Discussions surrounded soil degradation, climate change, biodiversity loss habitat loss and sustaining food supplies for LEDCs and how everything is linked together as a feedback loop.

Thank you to Ariane, Imperial College and the Grantham Institute and to the Year 12 scientists for the great discussions. We look forward to our next session on March 24th when we will be continuing the discussion and finalising our decisions. 

The next session will be on Tuesday 22nd of February and will be held remotely with two more sessions to follow as the students develop their ideas as they have to produce a solution to sustainable food production or sustainable food transport. The students will work in groups to research and innovate, ultimately producing a written report and presenting their findings at Imperial in the last session to a group of scientists (in a format similar to TV’s Dragons Den).