Evolutionary ecology: field practical lessons on a bike in an eco-sustainable course
Bike helmets, bellows, repair set, notes and pen, and mostly, a public transportation card and a bike. This is the material six hundred students from the Faculty of Biology used to contribute, since 2016, to decarbonize the atmosphere and limit greenhouse effect gases to go to their practicals in Delta del Llobregat as part of the Evolutionary Ecology subject.
Bike helmets, bellows, repair set, notes and pen, and mostly, a public transportation card and a bike. This is the material six hundred students from the Faculty of Biology used to contribute, since 2016, to decarbonize the atmosphere and limit greenhouse effect gases to go to their practicals in Delta del Llobregat as part of the Evolutionary Ecology subject.
Environmental sustainability and beneficial effects on health are some of the direct advantages of the new model of alternative and sustainable transport “which helps save resources, creates empathy among bikers and contributes to share the importance of being aware of climate emergency”, notes the lecturer Joan Lluís Pretus, coordinator of the course on Evolutionary Ecology and promoter of this environmental initiative.
Field practicals with zero emissions
Traditionally, students of this course went to Delta del Llobregat by rented vans, a transport system requiring high environmental and economic costs. The opening of the new L9 south metro line in 2019 -with connections in Barcelona Knowledge Campus- helped as inflection point in the logistics of field practicals. Since then, lecturers and students travel by metro to the Terminal 1 in El Prat Airport, and then they continue their journey by bike, which is given by the Faculty of Biology. After a few kilometres by bike they reach the Mediterranean Littoral Ecosystem Experimental Campus, in Delta del Llobregat.
In that area, the students can study the biology and demography of several models of the Hermannʼs Tortoise (Testudo hermanni), recovered by the Consortium for the Recovery of Fauna in the Balearic Islands (COFIB) in Menorca. This turtle, currently threatened by illegal capture and degradation of natural habitat, was introduced in this Gymnesian Island about eight hundred years ago -in particular, during the Reconquista of Menorca by the Crown of Aragon- according to genetic analysis carried out on this species.
Mind changes for a more sustainable future
“The bike gives you an idea of reality the car cannot give you. This transport is closer to our way of understanding the surrounding environment”, says Joan Lluís Pretus, from the Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences, and the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio) of the University of Barcelona. “In particular, ecology lecturers should be a model of sustainable activities, and that is why a change in mind is so necessary”.
Participants in this initiative to zero emission field practicals are the lecturers Susanna Bernal, Laura Baldo, Cesc Múrria, Joan Gomà, Dani von Schiller, Guillem Masó, Marina Pastor, Marta Pagès, Francesc Sabater and Marisol Felip, from the same Department. Regarding the students, the assessment of the model of these bike practicals is still an enigma: why cannot we take these practicals more frequently over the years of this degree? -is what they say.