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Hello 2020!
It's been a very long time since I posted anything on this blog. You might be forgiven for thinking that this means 2019 was pretty quiet - a reasonable assumption, but so, so wrong. Many, many things happened - and most of them were crammed into just three quarters of a year because (I realised the other day) I spent three of 2019's twelve months parenting and away from work! So I hope you can forgive me a second consecutive year of publishing an annual review in February... Here's a potted summary of some of the highlights.
Files
At the time of my last blog post, I was just adding the project's 14th species (and 15th model), the Atlas Cedar, to MorphoSource. This Moroccan specimen, sent by Ben Bell at the University of Manchester, was the first non-European pollen I'd scanned. Since then, the collection has doubled in size and vastly expanded its coverage, thanks largely to material from Alastair Culham and the University of Reading herbarium. Now, the pollen online spans an area from Chile's southern tip (Drimys winteri) to Turkey (Chenopodium album), and stretches back in time as far as 1901 (Salvia pratensis). There are now 30 models available online - check them out!
And it's not stopping there. Thanks to Felipe Franco Gaviria (University of Exeter) our collection's set to double in size again in the next month or so, making its first foray into the tropics with around 30 species from Colombia. Then there's scope to double it yet again, with Hermann Behling (Goettingen) and Suzette Flantua (Bergen) generously having sent well over 100 specimens from their reference collections, covering Ecuador, Tanzania, Mongolia and even more of Europe!
With reference collections and herbaria at Reading and Hull also available for occasional further raiding (with permission, of course), I'm really looking forward to expanding the project's coverage over the coming months. And, if you want to help me cover regions or taxa that aren't mentioned above, I'd love to hear from you! The only constraint on how far I can take this is time (I do have a PhD to finish after all) - oh, yes, and money...
Funding
Originally, this project was funded by £500 from the lovely people behind the I'm a Scientist competition (which paid for my set of models), to which I then added £2,500 from the University of Reading's Teaching and Learning Development Fund. That grant was due to end last summer, but they generously agreed to roll it over for this academic year in light of my time away from work last year. It'll now run out six months from now, and I'm going to be burning through that money a lot faster than before - after it broke in a very expensive way, the price of time on the scanning microscope has increased ninefold... So, any suggestions (or even offers) of potential future sources of funding to keep the project rolling and expanding would be very welcome!
That said, there has been some other good news on the funding front: Alastair Culham and I, along with other pollen-related researchers at Reading, were awarded £5,000 from the NERC Embedding Engagement fund. This is funding a short project - November (or mid-December, it transpired) to March - in which we're working with engagement specialists to co-create and trial 3D-pollen-themed outreach activities. And the best part? These aren't just for us: once we've tried and refined them, we're going to post the plans on this website for you to use and adapt for yourselves. We hope they'll be useful!
Fun
For me, this has been one of the most prevalent things from the last year of this project. Josie's tweet highlighted the creative fun we had in the first of our NERC-funded co-creation workshops last week, but 3D pollen joy has abounded over the last 12 months!
I've had a great time taking the models to conferences - starting with the Linnean Society Student Conference last February, and extending through various others including the British Ecological Society's Annual Meeting in Belfast and INQUA last summer in Dublin. I've discovered that they're a great way of bribing an audience - people love being given toys during a talk...
I particularly got to appreciate the models' wow factor at INQUA - although at a conference full of palaeoecologists it shouldn't have been a surprise. It was great to see various experts enjoying the models (and approving their accuracy!), and even on occasion to see them draw crowds, but by far my favourite 3D pollen moment at the conference was meeting Kat Holt, the New Zealand lecturer who first 3D-printed pollen grains. I doubt I ever would have got this project off the ground without her trailblazing work and encouragement in its early stages, so it was great to finally meet in person. And, along with other contacts from INQUA, we're hoping to collaborate on some research into the models' educational value, so stay tuned...
So what else did the year hold? Well, the project won Reading's doctoral research engagement prize at the University's PhD conference this year, and an image I made from my scans won the research image prize too. The models have cropped up in museum exhibitions (including a new gallery at the Naturalis Biodiversity Centre), undergraduate modules and outreach events around the world, been given out to attendees at the African Pollen Database workshop, and even been made into a Snapchat filter!
Friends!
Finally, just a short note to say that there is now more than one online source of accurate, free 3D pollen models online. That is to say, my project has got a 3D pollen friend! Janelle Stevenson, of the Australian National University, has scanned a variety of important Australian pollen types, including Casuarina, Acacia and Eucalyptus, which are available for download here. Hopefully this will be a useful complement to the taxa available here!
Fin.
Really, a diligent author would have written blog posts about each of these things to give them a fair share of the limelight, but unfortunately this will just have to do! I'd promise to do better in 2020, but as I reach the pointy end of my PhD I know that's a promise I'm unlikely to keep... I will do my best, though, and if you want to keep more up to date with what's going on in the 3D pollen world, you're probably best to follow along on Twitter (@3Dpollenproject). Anyway, here's to this year, and all the good things it'll bring!
Oli
(Forgot: I've added a new page to the site that should be useful - it's a list of all the pollen types scanned and the kinds of files available for each (scan images/videos and/or 3D-printable meshes), with links to view each model on Sketchfab or download it from MorphoSource. You can find it here. I'll endeavour to keep it more up-to-date than this blog...)