• Question: in what way is your work important? How does it effect the enviroment?

    Asked by bloonater to Claire, Joanna, Kapila, Renata, Suzanne on 17 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by arnog002, snool002, godda019, chazzabeast.
    • Photo: Suzanne Harvey

      Suzanne Harvey answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      This is a really interesting question, and one that comes up a lot for researchers looking to start a new project or get funding for this kind of work. For me, there are two sides to the importance of my work – one is that it helps our understanding of humans and helps us to know why we behave the way we do. I think this is really important, but it always helps to have benefits you can see as well! This is linked to the question about the environment. While we’re at the field site to research animal behaviour, setting up a project has hugely reduced illegal poaching of the rare animals in the national park, and helped bring money to the local villages for projects like setting up a school.

      The effect we have on the environment through building a field site is very small – we use solar power and live in a small clearing in the forest, as you can see from the photos on my profile it is very basic and doesn’t disturb the animals much! In fact, the monkeys often wander through camp as though we’re not there at all…

    • Photo: Renata Medeiros

      Renata Medeiros answered on 18 Jun 2013:

      I think every knowledge we get about the world we live in is valuable and in that sense all science is important because it is giving us knowledge. However, as Suzanne mentioned, science needs funding, it costs money so we need to make choices and hopefully research the things we believe are most useful.
      In my case, I study seabirds and studying them can tell us many things about our oceans and the marine life in general. This is important because we depend on our oceans for many things (I wonder if you can think of some) but we actually know very little about it, compared to what we know about the land. I am also trying to understand how will some animals cope with changes in the worlds’ climate – human activities are changing the weather and making our world get warmer and warmer, which can make life on earth more difficult for many animals including us. It is important to understand how this will work so that we can make good decisions on how to protect some animal species and ourselves.

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