Building my network in Scotland

During October, I island-hopped to Stirling, Scotland with my long-time collaborator Katherine Webster. Flying from Belfast to Glasgow is amazingly quick - just 20 minutes in the plane. A bus, train, and then taxi took us into Stirling, where the University of Stirling is located (http://www.stir.ac.uk/). For those of you who might not be up on their UK geography, here is a map: http://goo.gl/maps/k2QaT. Stirling is where THE Wallace (featured in Braveheart) is from, so there is a big monument to him there (tower in pic below).

The first day in Stirling, I gave an invited talk to the Scottish Freshwater Group:
http://www.ceh.ac.uk/sci_programmes/water/scottishfreshwatergroup.html. They have meetings twice a year, and this one was co-sponsored by the IBIS Project (http://www.loughs-agency.org/ibis) and held at the University of Stirling (pic taken while on campus below). My talk was titled Landscape approaches for understanding and managing lakes. The room was full and my talk went well. I had quite a few people talk with me afterwards about taking a landscape perspective in limnology, using hierarchical models, or creating and maintaining effective collaborative research teams. Good stuff!

The next day, we met with Scottish scientists who do very complementary research to the Landscape Limnology Research Group (www.fw.msu.edu/~llrg) and who could be future collaborators. We met with Andrew Tyler and Peter Hunter from the University of Stirling, Laurence Carvalho from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology at the National Environmental Research Council, and Mark Cutler, Eirini Politi, and John Rowan from the University of Dundee (http://www.dundee.ac.uk/). 

We exchanged information about our respective research programs, including GloboLakes 
(http://www.globolakes.ac.uk/) and CSI Limnology (www.csilimnology.org). We established 
that there are many, many opportunities for interesting collaboration and are planning to 
meet again soon.