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Well, it's been a fun couple of months! I thought it was high time I wrote an update to catch up on everything that's happened since my last blog post and the website launch.
Honestly, I've been a little bit bowled over by people's positive responses ever since I first made my plans for this project public. I've had so much encouragement from people I've never met, some very exciting email conversations about potential collaborations, and more pollen suggestions than you can shake a stick at! We've had suggestions from palaeoecologists working in parts of every continent, as well as contributions from people whose interest in pollen relates to hayfever or biomedical applications. To see some of them, read through the responses to the tweet below and the follow-up:
For obvious reasons we can't guarantee that we'll be able to scan all of these taxa, but it's great to get a clearer idea of how useful these resources would be - and hopefully it should allow us to target our scanning so that as many people as possible have at least a couple of useful pollen types available. I also very much hope that our work (especially publicising effective methods) will encourage others to have a go at this themselves and share the results!
On that note, I've had some very fruitful discussions about methods with various people in the last month or so. The procedure we plan to start off with should only require spare reference collection material and a standard mounting medium, hopefully making it as easy, efficient and low-cost as possible. We haven't trialled it yet (for reasons I'll mention shortly) so I'll hold off sharing details until we know it works, but I've got my fingers crossed!
I had hoped to be able to report more progress by now than this, but unfortunately the busy-ness of life has got in the way. Initially things were (rightly) slowed down by the three-week strike over UK university pensions, and by the time it concluded both teaching and research had ramped up. This all culminated in a mad month in which, either side of some family time around Easter, I drafted a manuscript for publication, spent a week in Spain on a second-year field trip, gave a tiny talk at the Royal Institution (!), presented at one conference and made a poster for another, all while marking nearly 100 first-year essays..! Although there's still another conference and a bit more marking to do in the next couple of weeks, things are much calmer now - hopefully my next blog post will have more progress to report.
Anyway, that's the excuses and progress out of the way, so the final thing promised in the title is this: some very exciting news. At Frank's suggestion, I applied to the University of Reading's Teaching and Learning Development Fund for some money to support this project and, particularly, to underpin some research into its impact on undergraduate education. It blew my mind slightly when I worked out that, in Reading's School of Archaeology, Geography and Environmental Sciences, about 200 students take modules with a major pollen component each year - that's a lot of teaching that could be revolutionised by 3D pollen resources!
As I mentioned in my first blog post, our current third-year students thought they would be a great help, and happily the review panel thought likewise: I'm absolutely delighted to announce that we've been awarded £2,500! This is five times the project's initial funding and opens up a host of opportunities. Especially, collaborating with Jane Bunting (University of Hull) and Bronwen Whitney (Northumbria University) over the next year, we're aiming to look into the teaching and learning effects of 3D pollen resources - I can't wait to get started.
So, that's the update - progress, excuses, and exciting news! Please get in touch if you have any queries, comments or suggestions; it's always great to hear from you.
Oli