Flying from Belfast to Glasgow is amazingly quick - just 20 minutes in the plane. A bus, train, and then taxi took us into Stirling, where the University of Stirling is located (http://www.stir.ac.uk/). For those of you who might not be up on their UK geography, here is a map: http://goo.gl/maps/k2QaT. Stirling is where THE Wallace (featured in Braveheart) is from, so there is a big monument to him there - that's the tower in the pic below, this was practically the view from our hotel room on campus.
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The first day in Stirling, I gave an invited talk to the Scottish Freshwater Group:
http://www.ceh.ac.uk/sci_programmes/water/scottishfreshwatergroup.html. They have meetings twice a year, and this one was co-sponsored by the IBIS Project (http://www.loughs-agency.org/ibis) and held at the University of Stirling. My talk was titled Landscape approaches for understanding and managing lakes. The room was full and my talk went well. I had quite a few people talk with me afterwards about taking a landscape perspective in limnology, using hierarchical models, or creating and maintaining effective collaborative research teams. Good stuff!
One funny thing...this Group's meeting was held in a U lecture hall - check out what someone had written on the board, presumably before a recent class, and then no one cared enough to erase before or during the meeting (below pic). I found this situation funny - no WAY would that have a) been written by an instructor in the US, b) not been erased by an instructor in the US if it was written by a student, or c) not been erased by a meeting organizer before the conference talks started in the US! Just goes to show you how uptight we Americans are!
That night, our hosts took Kath and I to a restaurant out in the middle of nowhere (seriously, completely dark, very narrow roads, no people) to eat a really good traditional Scottish meal. No, I didn't get anything too crazy, but I did try my first meringue dessert and it was REALLY good.
The next day, we met with Scottish scientists who do very complementary research to the Landscape Limnology Research Group (www.fw.msu.edu/~llrg) and who could be future collaborators. We met with Andrew Tyler and Peter Hunter from the University of Stirling, Laurence Carvalho from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology at the National Environmental Research Council, and Mark Cutler, Eirini Politi, and John Rowan from the University of Dundee (http://www.dundee.ac.uk/).
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| Lake on the U Stirling campus - Kath and I went for a walk around half of it before the meeting. |
(http://www.globolakes.ac.uk/) and CSI Limnology (www.csilimnology.org). We established
that there are many, many opportunities for interesting collaboration and are planning to
meet again soon.
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