HQP Summer Travel Series: Ehsan

Welcome to our first instalment of our HQP Summer Travel Series! This series will highlight some of the exciting trips that our HQPs went on this summer through the HQP mobility fund. We begin our series with an entry from Theme 2 PhD candidate Ehsan Pashanejad. Ehsan had a busy summer involving both a field trip to the Prairies for his research and a trip to Montréal for this year's ESA conference! 

Ehsan canoes at Oak Hammock Marsh (MB), exploring the beauty and functions of the wetland ecosystem (Pashanejad 2022)

Ehsan presents his research to Ducks Unlimited Canada's Scientists at the Institute for Wetland and Waterfowl Research (MB) (Pashanejad 2022)

In a single word, both the field trip and ESA were awesome! The ESA was the ever-big meeting for me so far and I had the opportunity to learn from different perspectives and see various up-to-date presentations and lectures.  

But the greatest takeaways from my prairie field trip. I can summarize in a few bullet points:  

• See the beauty of the landscape for the first time and revise my mental model of the modelling framework that I have been thinking about for at least a year!  
• Visit a farm in Saskatchewan for an event (invited by the Saskatchewan ministry of agriculture to demonstrate how honey is being produced. Also, to establish collaboration between local/provincial government bodies for data sharing (which is in progress).  
• Visit Ducks Unlimited Canada's head office in Winnipeg, present some of my pollination mapping work and initiate a collaboration to conduct more in-depth research with their research scientists and learn from their work.  
• Visit a research farm at Manitoba Beef and Forage Initiative and learn from farm scale sustainable management approach.  

The field trip and ESA were both an eye opener and I hope there will be such opportunities again in the future as I am moving forward in my research to be engaged with the local context of ecosystem service modelling.   

Ehsan Pashanejad is a PhD student at the University of British Columbia. You can read more about his research with theme 2 by visiting his profile here. ​