Animal and Plant Sciences newsletter: Spring 2017

Department Of Animal & Plant Sciences.

Newsletter SPRING 2017

We hope everything is going well as you prepare and revise for your next exams. The deadline for making firm and insurance university choices is also coming up, if you haven’t made your decisions yet.

If there’s anything else we can help you with between now and deadline day, feel free to get in touch. Our contact details are on the back.

For now, we’d like to share some of the latest news from Animal and Plant Sciences here at the University of Sheffield.

Dr Andrew Beckerman Director of Admissions

In the media The results of the Times Higher Education Student Experience Survey 2017 have just come out and we’re proud to say that the University of Sheffield has been voted:

Our department has been generating column inches and filling TV schedules recently recently. One of our graduates, Emma Napper (above) has been interviewed by Vogue, Cosmopolitan and Wired about her work as a producer on the latest David Attenborough series, Plant Earth II. She’s one of several of our alumni who gone into careers making wildlife documentaries.

We were also pleased to show the BBC’s Michael Portillo around our Alfred Denny Museum of Zoology, when he visited Sheffield for his Great British Railway Journeys series. Dr Nicola Hemmings, one of our University teachers, was filmed showing him around our ancient and unusal exhibits (right).

Find links at www.facebook.com/SheffieldAPS

• The number one Russell Group university for student experience • Top three for student experience for the seventh year in a row • The number one students’ union for the ninth year in a row • Joint first place library services

Research round-up When they aren’t teaching, our staff are producing world-class research. Here are some of the latest findings from staff and students in Animal and Plant Sciences.

Increasing the water table in agricultural peatland could hold key to reducing UK’s greenhouse gas emissions Undergraduate students Charlotte Atherton and Thomas Gomersall, and postgraduate Samuel Musarika worked with Dr Donatella Zona, on a project looking at the link between the UK’s water table in agricultural peatlands and greenhouse gas emissions.

The work was published in the journal Science of the Total Environment and was covered by BBC News.

Bird lovers help scientists discover secrets of beak evolution Dr Gavin Thomas led a project that asked the public to help measure beak shapes from more than 2,000 bird species that have been 3D scanned from specimens at the Natural History Museum and the Manchester Museum. The team, including two of our former undergraduates and current PhD students Angela Chira and Emma Hughes, published findings in Nature showing that the most unusual beak shapes often involved periods of very fast evolutionary change.

Findings could help reduce the environmental impact of a loaf of bread?

Professor Duncan Cameron contributed to a Nature Plants study that found that the ammonium nitrate fertilizer used in wheat cultivation contributes 43 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in a loaf of bread.

Currently, 100 million tonnes of the fertiliser are used globally every year, but the discovery could help make bread production more sustainable.

READ MORE STORIES AT www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/nr

Egg mythbuster Guillemot eggs are widely considered as one of the most beautiful and extraordinary eggs in the bird world, and for years egg collectors believed they evolved their unique pear shape to prevent them from rolling off the ledges where guillemots typically breed.

But our Professor of Zoology, Tim Birkhead has discovered that the real reason is to protect the eggs from other birds that might hit them as they fly past.

Search ‘Tim Birkhead egg mythbuster’ on YouTube to learn more about Tim’s discovery

STAY IN TOUCH +44 (0)114 222 0123 animal.plant@sheffield.ac.uk www.sheffield.ac.uk/aps /SheffieldAPS @SheffieldAPS