UKRI Future Leaders Fellow. Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol and Research Fellow at the Federal University of Pará. TropEco Lab PI.
Neurodivergent. 1st-gen PhD & academic. Tropical forests & insects. Views my own. He/him Ele/dele.
🌳🌴🌳🪲🐞🐛🐜🦋🐝
Filipe França
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It has been intense and fruitful months. I am thankful to the TropEco Lab heroes whom I am honoured to supervise and work with at @ufpa.bsky.social & @bristolbiosci.bsky.social, and our partners/field assistants in Brazil & Ghana. Without you, there would be no science and life would be boring.
In April, Brazilian team finished fieldwork in Tailândia and Ghanaian team finished Bobiri fieldwork and started establishing our plots and collecting insects in the #AnkasaConservationArea. Highlight: we have a plot 15 km way from the car, a ~30-km #LongWalk to be done thrice within a week.
Main challenges/successes include Ghana-based team sorting out all field equipment/samples & waiting for export permits before going to the UK. Learning new words in an Indigenous language spoken in my country, producing a teaching material on Amazonian biodiversity in PT, EN & #Panará languages.
April was also one of (if not the most) challenging time in my career. Within 10 days, 4 team members got ill (malaria, food poisoning, acute appendicitis, suspected Mpox). I learnt lots on health insurance and system in Ghana, everyone recovered well, we celebrated 3 birthdays in the field! 🎉
In May, the team split up again. In Ghana, the team continued with the insect monitoring in Ankasa, and delivered a butterfly collection to Bobiri manager. In Brazil, we delivered training on insect monitoring for local #Indigenous leaders and scientists at the Panará Indigenous Territory.
Our CONNECT workshop was a success! Lots of knowledge exchanges on #AI for #BiodiversityMonitoring, SDMs, & eDNA/iDNA with practitioners, scientists and early-career researchers from Brazil, Ghana, and the UK. Thanks @cnpq-oficial.bsky.social / @ukri.org for funding us, and CSIR-FORIG for hosting us
Many #failures and #successes. In Brazil, light traps/data loggers working fine but not many #StinglessBees in our #NestTraps, with some destroyed by animals. In Ghana, all Bobiri sites established, but many #WaspStings (same in Brazil) and a “tired car wheel asking for a separation from the car”. 😅
Our TropEco Lab has been busy in the last three months: three teams across four regions in the Brazilian Amazon and Ghanaian forests. A quick summary of the joy and madness of our #fieldwork across continents.
In March, we were split between Tailândia (Pará, Brazil), collecting environmental data, trying to collect stingless bees, and testing our new light traps; and Kumasi (Ghana), establishing our long-term insect monitoring plots, testing new #LightTraps, and delivering a capacity-building workshop.
Watch out for the next generation of tropical ecologists and #insect taxonomists. Amazonian #fieldwork already finished in two regions, moving our lab to the next region tomorrow! A joint effort to monitor insect biodiversity changes across the tropics.
#WeAreUKRI #UKRIFLF #CienciaBrasileira #CNPq
