Awards, awards, awards!

The dedication of Conserve me volunteers and the value of the organisation’s work was given a big thumbs up recently.  At Queen Mary University of London, annual celebration of all the good things that the university’s students achieve away from the lecture theatres, three of our team picked up awards.

Helen, Maaike and Stephen all picked up the Gold Award for their commitment to the schools project, whilst Stephen also shared the Volunteer of the Year award and got the Alumni Association’s vote for the Student Achievement Award!

“It’s a real honour to get this kind of recognition,” Stephen said after the ceremony.  “It shows that other people really value the work that we’re doing.”

Well done all three from everyone at Conserve me!

Conserve me launches The Attenborough Group

Conserve me have created an opportunity for corporate companies and other organisations to help engage young people in science and also gain a better understanding of the future trends across the next generation to help open up the environmental job sector for upcoming graduates.

The Attenborough Group
A dynamic network for businesses, academia and public sector organisations to meet, share knowledge and build relationships from across the environmental sector, collectively promoting science education and the importance of scientific research to young people. The group actively engages with the next generation to gain a better understanding of their future thinking, to ensure the sector can enhance communicates of environmental career opportunities open to science graduates.

As the UK moves into a low carbon economy, there will be an increased demand for environmental jobs, therefore we need more young people studying science to fill these roles in the future. This group is able to promote research excellence, innovation and collectively have a stronger and more proactive voice to ensure young people understand where these future opportunities will become available and how they can reach them.

The Attenborough Group provides companies with shared knowledge through peer to peer networking across the environmental sector, the opportunity to run events and support campaigns for the target audience and initiate ways to collectively achieve change. The group also supports an organisation’s corporate social responsibility commitment, and raises their profile to future employees who are interested in future careers in the environmental sector.

If your company is interested in joining this group or you think a certain organisation would be beneficial in supporting this agenda, please email shelley@conserveme.org

We want to make this group a huge success to help the next generation of aspiring scientists reach their full potential and access the environmental career market of the future.

Conserve me, co-founder Shelley Rowley joins The Lost World Expedition to film wildlife documentaries in the Guiana Highlands

In August 2010, ten participates from across the UK joined cameramen Adrian Warren and Jesse Wilkinson from BBC Springwatch team and expedition leader Stewart McPherson on the Lost World Expedition to Mount Romaina which is situated in the Guiana Highlands in Venezuela. The tablelands of the Guiana Highlands are among the most spectacular, yet least explored, mountains of our world. Each is an immense sandstone plateau that is encircled on all sides by gigantic vertical cliffs up to 1,000 metres tall. The summits of these unique mountains have remained isolated for millions of years, and today harbour plants, animals and landscapes that occur nowhere else on Earth. The focus of The Lost World Project is Mount Roraima - the plateau that inspired Arthur Conan Doyle to write the most famous adventure novel of all time ‘The Lost World’, and has most recently been credited as being the major influence behind Disney Pixar’s animated blockbuster ‘UP’. I was fortunate to join this team and travel to Venezuela in search of new species and learn the ropes of wildlife documentary making. Once we reached Mount Roraima we had two aims; firstly, shoot footage on finding new species for a BBC documentary called ‘Discovering the Decades’ which is due to be aired in December 2010 and secondly, shoot a fifty minute documentary highlighting the conservation issues in the area, that will then be premiered at the Royal Geographical Society and the Zoological Society of London in May/June 2011. The expedition were fortunate to have Adrian Warren, a well known and experienced cameraman and producer of wildlife documentaries and has worked with David Attenborough for over 30 years, so the expedition was thrilled to have him on board. Adrian knows the Guiana Highlands well, first travelling there in the 70’s and even taking the Disney Pixar team up Mount Roraima to research for the making of ‘UP’.

The climb… Reaching the start of the expedition took three days of many plane journeys, bus rides and 4x4 jeeps, but thankfully all went fairly smoothly considering the political situation in Venezuela. We went as far as the road could take us and from there we had to walk. We started in a small indigenous village of the Pemon people, called Paratepuis. We were fortunate to camp a night there, as the local people never really allow this to happen. Even with a 5am start we weren’t able to see Mount Roraima without cloud, but the weather changes so rapidly in the area, anything can happen. Before we started the trek we were told, ‘what you take, you carry!’ and for a ten day trip, with tents, roll mats, sleep bags and wet weather gear, etc I have to say I was a little more than worried about carrying a 18kg backpack for a 3 day climb and then 2 days back down. Being 5ft3 doesn’t give you much of a fighting chance, especially when stood next to another participate who was 6ft8 and had a pack of the same weight! So more than limited supplies was what I went for. We set out for what would be a 7 hour trek up and down a few hills for the first day and then another 6 hours on the second. Although the first few hours of the trek I thought I would collapse, it’s surprising how you get used to the weight when left with no choice… With such amazing scenery it’s easy to be distracted and also by these unbelievably annoying tiny insects called poriporis which bite and itch worse than mosquitoes, but they thankfully disappear in the highland areas. The second night we reached base camp in the dark and rain. I thought coming from the UK I would be fine with rain, but actually being constantly soaked to the bone is more of a challenge than I had previously anticipated.

The third morning was when I woke to see the base of the cliff of Mount Roraima and the full scale of the mountain really hit me. According to our Pemon guides, in a few hours I would be at the top of that! I however was really starting to understand how those 19 century explorers struggled with first reaching the summit. So 5 hours of rock climbing up waterfalls and huge bollards, I can now say took some serious positive mental attitude. There wasn’t a single step where you didn’t have to look and calculate where you put your foot, and again as in most cloud forests the rains fell! The last two hours was climbing up huge rocks up the side of the cliff, know as the ‘the ledge’. Reaching the top in glorious sunshine and breath taking views was well worth the hardship to get there.

We spent 6 further nights living in a small cave, known as ‘hotels’ on the south side of the plateau. We found 4 new species and a number of introduced species. Introduced species cause huge problems to the fragile ecosystem on the plateau surface and often brought up by tourists on their shoes and some of the larger mammals follow food or rubbish left on the path leading to the summit. We found a new millipede species and filmed an ancient lizard species for the first time. We were the first to ever see and film a weasel type breeding pair which lived right by our ‘hotel’. Our pemon guide who had come to the area for 15 yrs had never seen it before. It is likely to be an introduced species from the lowlands, but either a new species or a sign of continuing conservation pressures in the area; it was still a great find.

So the highlights of the trip

Finding new species for any zoologists has to rank the highest. I also really enjoyed being behind the scences of a wildlife documentary, learning from the experts and helping with filming footage. Playing with pre-dinosaur period animals is great too, like the Peddle toad shown below and ancient tarantulas. One of the cameramen realised a couple of tarantulas had taken the opportunity to share his tent! Taking a flight over some of the tepuis, including Mount Roraima, was amazing to see the scale of them from the air. The challenge of the climb and discovering the unusual yet wonderful landscape on top of Mount Roraima was such an incredible experience. Mount Roraima is as remote and strange as any explorer to the area has ever described, and I hope will remain that way for many future generations to experience.

What is next for the Lost World Project?

The Lost World Project is a unique not for profit initiative led by Ibex Earth that aims to generate £750,000 worth of funding over the next five years to help the urgent conservation needs of one of the world’s most remarkable regions – the Guiana Highlands (located in northern South America, extending from Venezuela into Guyana and northern Brazil).

Without action now, illegal gold mining, unregulated / unsustainable tourism, and the introduction of foreign plant and animal species will jeopardise the future of Mount Roraima and the Guiana Highlands. Without The Lost World Project the incredible animals, plants and landscapes that have remained unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs may struggle to survive in the world of tomorrow.