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Little Truckee River, USA: Invasive Algal Survey Emma Shearing

A microscopic alga called Didymosphenia geminata is known to be highly invasive of freshwater habitats in places as far apart as New Zealand, the USA and Europe. At its worst, it completely covers streambeds and aquatic plants with a thick layer of gelatinous slime, totally changing the local conditions and disrupting the food chain. Our understanding of how this diatom spreads, and why it sometimes blooms so prodigiously, remains poor. Emma Shearing, now in the final year of her Geography BSc, investigated this problem species by spending part of her summer wading a river in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. She was following up on earlier work by the US government in conducting river habitat surveys and collecting diatom samples, in order to analyse the current distribution of this pest and try to predict what might happen next. 

Nomadic Settlement in Kyrgyzstan Yuri Boyanin The decade of the 1930s was the most turbulent and disruptive in the history of Central Asia, as Stalin ordered all nomads to be settled and all land collectivised. For the peoples of Kyrgyzstan this meant a break with their centuries-old nomadic lifestyle and the forced acceptance of a new order. Yuri Boyanin, now a final-year history student and two others crossed five Central Asian mountain ranges last summer to research an almost forgotten world.  Their technique was to live amongst the people in the traditional way, whilst collecting oral histories from those who witnessed the original upheaval, as well as all that has followed since. By recording ordinary people’s real life stories along with their fears and expectations, Yuri has gained a new understanding of the epic struggle endured by the inhabitants of this strategic region, sandwiched as it is between the great powers of Russia and China.