There truly is nothing like a well-planned and structured sabbatical for giving professors the intellectual and emotional space to reflect on and crystallize what their previous five to six years of long days and hard work has been most fundamentally about. This is why, in my view, where they still exist, the sabbatical should be […]
Citizen Science
From Ecotourism Practitioner to Teacher & Researcher
I've been giving some lectures in the Biodiversity and Conservation course at Visva Bharati. So far, I've introduced students to arctic and forest ecology in Canada, and yesterday, I gave my first ever lecture on ecotourism, which is a topic in the course. Broadly speaking, ecotourism is the kind of tourism where people seek out […]
Digital Divide Chronicles Part 2
I began my career as a field ecologist on the remote shores of Hudson Bay, where I spent between two and four months off the electrical grid for five successive summers (1980-84). That's me at far left, with a rifle for polar bear protection. A generator charged the car battery that powered the radio that […]
Biology Graduate Students Bring the Bioblitz to YorkU
My friend and colleague, Guelph professor, Dr. Shoshanah Jacobs (left, with her new son) invited me to give a guest talk in her first year Biology course: Discovering Biodiversity. I introduced the bioblitz concept in my talk, and encouraged students to join in with one, or to even organize a bioblitz of their own. The general […]
New Indigenous People & Plants Trail at Royal Botanic Gardens, Hamilton
The new Indigenous People and Plants Trail at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Hamilton, Ontario, opens to the public on Monday 18th September 2017. The trail, located in Cootes Paradise, teaches us about how plants were used by the Anishinaabe people. I found a great journal article about Anishnaabe ethnobotany in NW Ontario, by Davidson-Hunt, Jack, Mandamin & […]
Gardening for biodiversity & local food in Carolinian Canada
Two excellent Canadian documentaries, The End of Suburbia (2004) and Escape from Suburbia (2007), discuss the enormous implications of our unsustainable North American car culture, which has spawned sprawling suburbs and gridlock in southwestern Ontario, and the Greater Toronto Area. These films include fascinating conversations with "futurists" about how people will convert their (sub)urban lawns into vegetable patches to grow local […]
More public science: appearing on the ZDF series, Infestation!
I doubted that much could top discovering that my 2013 Skype chat about plant defences got me a movie credit in a science fiction feature film! But, you never can tell where science outreach and engagement will take you. Just a few weeks after hearing about my Botanical Consultant film credit, some of my other Public Science led to just as unexpected an […]
Soapbox Science Comes to North America at Yonge & Dundas in Downtown Toronto
Getting In The Zone with Carolinian Canada Coalition and World Wildlife Fund Canada
Help biodiversity & be a #CitizenScientist #InTheZone: @carolinianzone & @WWFCanada's exciting new joint initiative https://t.co/fTM2S1qfmJ pic.twitter.com/Qn6oZMlDOv — ((( Dawn Bazely ))) (@dawnbazely) October 27, 2016 My last post was about the national environmental charity, Nature Canada's Women for Nature Network. Today, I'm going local, in reflecting on why I'm a member of the board of directors of […]
What I learned about Instagram from #ResearcherTakeoverTuesday at the COU
The clip of sea butterflies, below is from Anne Todgham's Go Pro. It didn't make it onto my Research Matters Instagram #ResearcherTakeoverTuesday in September. Anne, who is a Biology prof. in animal physiology at UC Davis, was an expedition cruise passenger on my Arctic Safari trip with Adventure Canada. Here's the text I wrote to accompany this clip: The arctic oceans […]
