Ecological Surveys and Environmental Training

Signed in as:

filler@godaddy.com

Account

Surveys - Education - Training

About Roslyne Ecological

Origin

Roslyne Ecological was started in the 1990s by Dr. Richard Osmond. Richard was keen to pursue his enthusiasm for environmental education and so became a freelance consultant offering advice and providing support for outdoor education with schools and conservation organisations.

Richard Osmond

Richard gained a B.Sc. in Zoology at Bangor University and stayed on to study for a Ph.D. in ecological genetics. He followed this by completing the Post-graduate Certificate in Education at Southampton University. He taught Biology at Barton Peveril VIth Form College before concentrating on outdoor education. He set up a Field Study Centre on the Warnford Estate in the Meon Valley in Hampshire. and when that closed he found a way to take the study centre on the road with the Hi-Tech Wild-Trek Trailer

Hi-Tech Wild-Trek

In the 1990s, schools were finding it difficult to make off-site visits due to high transport costs and Health and Safety concerns. Instead, there was a push to make more use of school grounds as a educational resource. The Hi-Tech Wild-Trek trailer was designed to provide the equipment and expertise to assist with ecological investigations outside the classroom.

More about Hi-Tech Wild-Trek

On the road from 1996 - 2015

Besides offering support for schools to be able to make better use of their outdoor spaces, Hi-Tech Wild-Trek also provided a means to explore the new opportunities of Information Technology. On board the trailer, the video and computer equipment did not only display magnified images of creatures found during bug-hunts and pond dipping but also captured those images on video tape or as computer files which could then be used in follow-up lessons. As technology moved on, the video become HD and all the output was digitised.

As a first trial of the system, the trailer faced the general public at Marwell Zoo's Christmas event. From this experience, it was realised that there was a role to be played at public events. In the years that followed, the trailer had a very varied range of clients: schools, wildlife trusts, local authority countryside teams, farm education, Freshwater Biological Association, South of England Show, Springwatch events and more. Most of the activity was in the South of England, but the trailer visited a total of 15 counties and 4 London Boroughs during its time on the road. The Archive section of this website will report on some of the trailer's activities.

Change of focus since 2015

Having retired the Hi-Tech Wild-Trek trailer in 2015, educational support continued for several of our clients but the focus was intended to be on preparing educational resources based on the experience gained from the previous 20 years. Some of this has occurred under the banner of Dipping Deeper, but with a rapidly increasing concern for the health of our rivers, there has been a rise in demand for training volunteers to undertake monitoring. In collaboration with Matt Owen-Farmer, training for the RIverfly Monitoring Initiative had been part of our work since before 2010. Matt and Richard were then invited to take over the training for a higher level scheme that was subsequently developed by Wildfish to become SmartRivers. This is now a nationwide scheme that forms a large part of the work of Roslyne Ecological.