BU Research Blog

Updates on our international research project LEAP (landscape ecology and primatology), led by Amanda Korstjens and Ross Hill and that falls at BU under the Department of Life and Environmental Sciences and the ISLHE (see my previous blog for more info).

Thanks to a UG Research Assistant in the BU URAP programme, we now have a fabulous website to show off the research of LEAP. Media student Matthew Hammond even created a lovely logo for us. The website is now publicly accessible here: http://go-leap.wix.com/home.

Secondly, funding has been obtained for Gaius Wilson’s (an Indian postdoc) Sumatran elephant research. We received an International Elephant Foundation grant of over $55000 and £5000 from Rufford Small Grants. This is an expensive project so we cannot not leave it at that yet but it is great that our hard work on these funding applications this summer paid off.
I also want to highlight that this was supported by the training I received through the Grants Academy and the EUADS grants scheme as BU and 1:1 help from Martin Pickard and Chris. Gaius attended a 2-day workshop for EU Marie S Curie fellowship applications in March at BU and that started the elephant project off (including a submission for such a fellowship of course). Kerri and Alice from RKEO have been great in getting us through our summer of applications, thank you! There are more submissions to come.

Please visit our website and contact Amanda Korstjens or Ross Hill if you are interested in collaborating on any of our projects. We will need MRes students or other people in the field to help with data collection on Human-elephant co-existence (or conflict) and our various other research projects in Indonesia and Uganda. Any field project requires a minimum of 6 months in the field.

LEAP team BU Oct 2015