Author: Sabina Nowakowska

End of the internship at London Wetland Centre.

My internship at London Wetland Centre has finished. It has been great 4 weeks. I have done all the fieldwork designed by myself and I have completed my report for WWT. I marked all the sites where different species of ladybirds were spotted on the map of LWC and included it in my report. The main findings from my quantitative measurements are as follows:

  • Ladybird community at LWC is dominated by harlequin ladybird – Harmonia axyridis, which comprises 70% of all tree-living ladybirds at LWC.
  • There is a positive correlation between the density of aphids on the tree and the abundance and diversity of ladybirds living on the tree.

Internship at London Wetland Centre – continuation.

I am in the middle of my internship at London Wetland Centre. I have finished sampling in the field and now I am moving on to data analysis and writing my report for WWT about ladybirds at LWC. Fieldwork was quite intense, it took 9 consecutive days of sampling, interrupted by the moody weather. Still, on most of the days I managed to sample throughout the whole day, but sometimes I had to stop after 2h due to rain. I must admit that I really enjoyed fieldwork – I was outside all the time and in the very pleasant surroundings, which fully compensated the repetitiveness of the actions that I had to undertake to collect enough data.

First week at the London Wetland Centre

WWT (Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust) is a conservation charity that aims to sustainably manage and protect wetlands and species associated with this particualar type of habitat, as well as educate people about the importance of wetland environment. The charity runs 9 nature reserves across the country and one of them is located in west London. What I like about LWC (London Wetland Centre) is the fact that there is such a nice nature reserve in this big city and also that WWT fantastically combines their scientific mission with being very open to the public.

First day of my internship at (LWC) started with a short induction.