Activities in 2023

In October Julia taught in the new course on ‘Conservation Science and Impact’, in which she lectured master students in Environmental Biology.
In the mastercourse ‘Ecology of Natural Resources’ Julia lectured about her personal experiences working in nature conservation.

In the period end of November/beginning of December Julia gave a few lectures in the bachelor course on tropical ecology. She stimulated students to think about social aspects of nature conservation in the tropics.

Blog workshop

Each October between 2015-2020, Jaboury Ghazoul led a blog workshop for master students at Utrecht University. In this one-day workshop, students (app. 40 per year) had fun exploring different styles and formats for communicating science to a public audience. All of the students drafted their own blogs on a variety of topics, ranging from plastic pollution, to veganism, and even the use of music to change our environmental perceptions.

Bachelor course on International Nature Conservation

Each year, from November until February, the UU organizes a bachelor course (level 3, 7.5EC). Marijke van Kuijk and the chair holder are the main lecturers in this course, to which up to 60 student participate. Topics dealt with in the course include sustainable forest management, biodiversity conservation, management of ecosystem services, forest restoration, landscape planning and sustainable production of agricultural commodities.

Examples of modules in the course:

o In November 2019, Jaboury Ghazoul and John Garcia (ETH, Zurich) explored issues relating to oil palm landscapes. The students used a role-playing game to explore water use and management strategies in the Colombian Llanos region, where oil palm competes with cattle and rice production for water resources.

o In November 2018, the students spent two days exploring alternative approaches to forest and landscape restoration. Daniella Schweizer (ETH/UU) and Jaboury Ghazoul discussed with the students the value of forest restoration as a climate mitigation and environmental regeneration strategy. The students tackled this issue by considering the relative merits of plantations, agroforestry, native tree planting, and natural regeneration from social, economic and ecological perspectives.

Foreign Field Course

In 2015 and 2018, Marijke van Kuijk organized a field course to French Guyana for master students of the UU. Per course, 15 students participated. The course was organized in collaboration with the Association Trésor and local partners CIRAD and ONCFS, and was financially supported by the Prince Bernhard Chair. Various types of field research were performed in the rainforest. Data were analyzed by the students and the knowledge gained was used by organizations working in nature conservation in French Guyana. Some students say this was the best course they ever followed!

Various

Several bachelor and master students were (co)supervised by Jaboury Ghazoul or his colleagues, during their bachelor and master projects. For example: a PhD student of Jaboury Ghazoul supervised two bachelorstudents of the Unversity of Utrecht (UU) with their research and thesis. The research was about increase of the amount of ticks in Scotland als result of reforestation. The PhD student Robert Timmers (UU) is working together with postdocs of the group of Jaboury Ghazoul (Natalia Ocampo en John Garcia) on a paper about patterns of bird dispersal in Brasil.

Also some UU-students take part in the course on Alpine Ecology, organized by ETH in Switzerland.