Hi,
I would like to describe what courses I had at SRUC. First of all, my courses here were quite different from what I study at SLU because business courses here were similar to the ones that I had already taken and there could be problems with overlapping courses eventually. But I think it was great to see something different and it gave me other perspectives and overall overview of how the environment works.
The third course at SRUC was Action for Biodiversity. Within this course, we covered various topics related to biodiversity loss and what has impacts on it, legislation and policy related to biodiversity protection, landscape changes, conservation of species and habitat, rewilding projects, biodiversity hotspots and differences between in situ and ex situ conservation. With this course, we had a possibility of going for a visit to Edinburgh ZOO which I was already writing about here and it was very a rewarding experience and I found out many important insights into ex situ conservation, what ZOOs do to conserve species and how do they do it. I think the video below can give you some of the insights, too.
We had to write an essay where we discussed how rewilding may conflict with nature conservation objectives and whether passive management is a realistic option in the UK. This topic was new to me but it was good to find out more about conservation/rewilding projects and see some successful projects that have been already done. The essay had to be 2500 words long again and we did not have to give any presentation or do any other tasks. During the exam weeks, we had to take an exam which was 50% of the final grade. We were given 4 topics/questions and had to choose 2 out of them and write an essay. We had two hours to finish both questions. I liked this system where you can choose the questions because you always have some areas with deeper knowledge hence you can show your knowledge better.
I think it is great that during Erasmus we can broaden our knowledge in the areas that we usually do not have an opportunity to get deeper into. Therefore this course was valuable for me.
Bye, Denisa