Natural History Museum - Steph West

S1E6 This is the first of a two-part special recorded at the Natural History Museum, South Kensington, London.
In this first half Steve Roe talks with Steph West who is the Biodiversity Training Manager at the Museum based within the Angela Marmont Centre for UK Biodiversity.
Steph discusses the need to train the next generation of natural historians using the Museum's scientists to decant their knowledge as well as some of the bat surveys she gets to undertake on the Museum's Estates and why she loves the nocturnal world so much.
Becoming interested in bats at the age of 12, Steph has worked in various aspects of ecology before her role at the Museum including work as an ecological consultant.
Acutely aware of the shift in conservation science, Steph also touches on how the NHM is changing to keep itself relevant in today's world.

You can find out more about the Angela Marmont Centre which is available for use by the public wanting to improve their identification skills here: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/take-part/centre-for-uk-biodiversity.html

Give them a follow on twitter here: https://twitter.com/NHM_ID

For info on the Wildlife Garden at the Museum, head here: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit/galleries-and-museum-map/wildlife-garden.html

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Producer: Steve Roe @SteveRoeBatMan
Cover Art: Rachel Hudson http://rachelhudsonillustration.com/info

Transcript

Steve Roe: 0:06

This is BatChat the podcast from the Bat Conservation Trust. [London Tube Train Announcement] Hello, and welcome to BatChat the podcast from the Bat Conservation Trust. I'm Steve Roe, and these next two episodes form a two part special recorded at the Natural History Museum in London, with two of its staff who, whilst work in separate areas of the museum, both deal with bats as part of their daily jobs. Next week, I speak with the curator of mammals, but today we're with the Biodiversity Training Manager. The Angela Marmot Centre for UK biodiversity at the Natural History Museum is unique within the UK. In addition to acting as a centre to promote the appreciation and study of UK biodiversity, it aims to address two of the central problems facing biodiversity and taxonomy. Namely how to inspire and nurture existing and future naturalists and how to engage the wider public in Natural History science. Last autumn I visited the museum just before opening hours, and in a room hidden away just behind the haensi hall where hope the blue whale plunges down to the 5 million visitors who go to the museum every year, I sat down with advisor diversity training manager at the centre Steph West. And my first question was, What does her job entail?

Steph West: 1:26

Well, all sorts of things, actually. So I came in originally to run a project called identification trainers for the future, which was about training people, particularly around identification skills for some of the harder to reach groups in the UK, a lot of invertebrate stuff, a lot of plants, lichens, those sorts of things. And following on from that, I was very fortunate to be offered a full time permanent role here, looking at how we continue to do that after the project. So essentially, my role is the legacy of the ID trainers project for the museum. So I'm working across various projects at the moment and looking at how we get identification skills training in and how we can essentially really decamps all the not well, as much as the knowledge and expertise from the museum experts into other people to try and grow that wealth of, of skills in natural history in the UK.

Steve Roe: 2:25

And you mentioned the identification trainers project there. How successful was that? And what are the plans to move that forward into the future?

Steph West: 2:32

Yes, so the idea behind this project was more successful than I think we could have imagined at the start. We were very fortunate to get that project, which we ran in partnership with the NBN trust and Field Studies Council as well. And obviously very generously sponsored by the Heritage Lottery Fund, through their skills, skills for the future projects. And out of that project, we generated 15 individuals who had each been with museum for a year training with top experts, I was gonna say in the UK, but actually in the world, around identification skills, both in the lab and in the field working with specimens. And each trainee got to spend three months working in their particular interest area, which was just such a unique opportunity for them. But the lovely thing with that project is we were able to train them in communication skills. And that's really the biggest success out of the project. We've generated 15 Amazing people with great identification skills across across a wealth of taxa. But they are all such good communicators in written form in verbal form. Many of them are running workshops and their own training courses, or they're working on projects where they're actively engaging people with natural history skills. And that's exactly what we wanted it to do. Those people can go off. And I mean, essentially, I guess you could imagine it as the pyramid scheme of identification skills. We've trained up those 15 people, they can then go off and train so many more across the rest of their careers. And they are all out there doing exactly that. Some of them still working at the museum. We've got people in Natural England, in wildlife trusts in, in various charities across the country, and working privately as well. And I'm just so impressed with everything they've done with all the opportunities that we gave them.

Steve Roe: 4:30

And what is it that makes you think training the next generation preparing for wildlife is so important.

Unknown: 4:36

identification skills are something that a lot of people kind of forget about in conservation, and I've worked in various different guises throughout ecology in the UK over the years now. And identification skills seem to be the one thing that a lot of people miss particularly for the tricky things particularly for invertebrates because they're hard to do. They're really difficult there aren't many people with that skills and that knowledge and often the texts, they feel keys and things like that are verging from non existent to terrible in some cases, and that makes it really inaccessible. But in terms of conservation, and one of the underlying principles is you can't conserve what you don't know is there you need to be able to identify things, and understand how those relationships between things in the ecosystems actually work. That's how that's the basic underlying principle of conservation, if we lose those skills, and let's face it, we've said for many years now that you know, our taxonomists are essentially an ageing population. We need that sustainability of identification skills, and particularly identifies with good communication skills, who can train other people who can find new ways of communicating both the skills of a taxonomist, but also why it's necessary, they can engage in with us people about it as well. And how do we go about doing that? How do we get younger people in the next generation involved in natural history and identification? Well it's actually been a fascinating process for me doing the details, projects, and everything I've got involved in subsequently, because that will and desire to learn it is very much there, I've met so many enthusiastic young people from very young age through to people who are starting to make choices about University and beyond, as well. And there was so much enthusiasm for it, but also a confusion about where to start. And I think what we need to do is to work on making those skills accessible, through things like better ID guides and through making training, accessible and affordable for people to be able to get to, and through just showing that that love and that passion doesn't need to go away. When you are attending, you tend to log over and you got excited about all the things going around underneath it. That's the best thing I find about ecology and conservation is you get to still do that when you're a grown up. And actually getting people to understand that that love and enjoyment of watching wildlife can carry on through your entire life.

Steve Roe: 7:11

And presumably being the centre for UK Biodiversity means that you've got a huge responsibility for all our biodiversity, including that bat species, what word does the centre do to help to conserve species in general, but also bat specifically? And how closely do you late liaise with BCT on this.

Unknown: 7:28

So we do, we do quite a lot of things in the centre. Our biggest role really is about making the museum as accessible as possible to people who want to develop their ID skills. So as well as training, we run an identification advisory service, for literally anyone can email us or ring us up, post us a specimen that they found. And we'll help them to identify it. We also offer a visitor space so people can come in, and they can start to work on the right ideas skills using our microscopes, and our photo stackers and things like that for free to. So they can come in and use all of our facilities. And then we also support recording groups and wildlife groups and things as well. We've got a space that people can come and use. And it's used by a lot of groups and societies around the world to run their own workshops and to spread their own information out to other people. But some of the things that people don't realise that me necessarily doing from here is we also manage the UK, what list of species. So that goes off to the NBN. So we essentially manage the names of everything in the UK. So all the synonyms or the confusion taxonomy when groups get split or lump back together, we manage all of that and then pass that information on to the NBN and to other organisations like the JNCC to support that conservation effort and recording effort as well. And then we run things like citizen science projects to get the general public enthused and contributing to science. And crucially, for us, it's about getting people contributing to science, so that they take that ownership, feel involved in it, and are actually generating useful information, not just throwing data into a pit, which is very disengaging. So a lot of what we're doing is about engaging people, and hoping to inspire them to be enthusiastic about the wildlife, we've got right on our doorstep. So we're doing all sorts of things. And then we also liaise with other organisations and with the rest of the science Life Sciences Department to supporting research. And we've recently started up a few projects, looking at the use of Edna in conservation. So we're working on two projects at the moment, one of which is just about to start. It's really exciting because it's around chalk grassland restoration. You in South London, and that's going to be from our side of it. We're working with London Wildlife Trust and gratify conservation on that one. And that's a project that's been sponsored by the players of the people's postcode lottery, to do all this amazing restoration work, but the bit that we're working on is the really exciting science side of it, where we're looking to see if through, through things like malaise traps and pitfall traps, if we can sequence and barcode the species within those traps, and therefore get a much more effective, faster list of invertebrates, particularly, which can then be used for conservation. One of the biggest issues with conservation management, particularly for insects and habitats, of course, is it's it's very hard to get an invertebrate species list of works and take an awful long time because it takes some incredible skills to get all the species groups down. Often, you might need to send samples off to multiple different experts, which might take time to get back in some cases, if at all, with the techniques that we're going to be trialling through that project, it would be a very, very rapid turnaround of a species list. And then we can really start to involve in vertebrates in conservation, and of course, invertebrates vital for bats. So what we're working on, well, we're not currently running any projects, specifically around bats, but very much looking at that whole ecosystem scale of conservation and how emerging science like the Adla work can can influence ecosystem level conservation, and therefore support the higher orders like predatory species like bats as part of it.

Steve Roe: 11:45

So how often do you encounter bats in your day to day job? I know yes, there's on your bio on the natural history museum site that you started off as a back consultants.

Unknown: 11:55

Do you still do any of that? I try to Yeah, that will always be my first love. So from a bat perspective, I, I got addicted to bats when I was a kid. When I was 12. I went on about work. And that was it. For me. That's brilliant. Because that just fascinating. And I've been very lucky. That all the way through my voluntary experience. And through my pay career, I've been able to incorporate that into all of it. So yes, I did consultancy in Munich before I came here. But I've also done lecturing and training around bats, works in local governments, specifically against specifically on bat conservation in planning. I've been heavily involved in it to everything that I've done in the museum, I get to do a lot of communication around the importance of bats. So I run lectures and talks over in the Attenborough studio. So of our nature lives, which are run as 45 minute ish talks to the public. They're free, anyone can come in. I don't have next one booked in at the moment, but everyone knows, scattered throughout the year. I do a lot of work front of house as well doing display standards and things with with the public for the museum. And a lot of that is I've been working quite a lot on the sort of predator prey arms race, essentially between bats and moths. And that always fascinates people and gets people interested in that connection between moths. And bats have also been actually helping out with some of the back servers on the museum. Most recently, not actually on this site yet. But we've got another site over at tring. The old Rothschild Museum, which is a brilliant location for bats. So I got to do a bat survey on that a couple of weeks ago. It's nice to dust off the old consultancy credentials and worth about licence around and yeah actually get to do some some pop up that work again, which is great fun. I mean I species nothing particularly on that one just we had some we know that we've got brand long IDs and pipistrelles in the main Rothschild building. But we had noctules overhead and soprano and common pipistrelles to also it's nice to just off the bat detectors again and do that. And also do some that walks with Hyde Park. So through the wall parks, I help out on some of their back walks and come along as a bit of a specialist to add a bit more into that. Yeah, so my back work now is kind of scattered whenever I got the opportunity here. It's always great fun, and it's great to still have that connection to bat. And obviously, Roberto who I think you're speaking to, for another one of these. Yeah, we try and team up occasionally and chat bats Whenever we can support the collections,

Steve Roe: 15:02

and you still haven't done any surveys on this site here at the main South Kensington site, the plans to do that in the future because you've got a lovely wildlife garden out there.

Unknown: 15:09

Yes, yeah. Thanks for watching the wildlife garden. It what I've done is great if people haven't been it's really worth a look. So there were about surveys that are done on that by the London bat group. So they set up some AnaBats for us every year. So we can see what's flying over. And we've got a few bat boxes up there as well. Nothing's ever been occupied so far, yet, there's always a chance to have been up for quite a while, but you never know. So yeah, so they they also get checked by London bat group periodically to but keep fingers crossed that someday, somebody might pop in and find one. But yeah, so as far as we're aware, we don't have bats roosting on the site. But I have just discovered that no one's actually been up into the lofts in the tower. So we're sort of eyeing those up at the moment to see if I can get the keys

Steve Roe: 16:06

Which are presumably very hard to get hold of.

Unknown: 16:08

No, no, I'm really hoping our estates team let me into to go and have a look. And how do you see the role of the museum in the future of conservation as a whole? Will the collections still be as important as they are today? Or do you see moving out into the field, and the digital world of collections and so on, So museums have to change. Science is changing, conservation is changing. And museums very much have to keep up with that. I mean, the reason we built the Darwin centre 10 years ago was to have better facilities for collection storage. But part of that is around storage of genetic material as well. And that is very much how the museum is going forward. We're currently working on two very ambitious projects, one of which is around digitising our existing collections. So to make them more available to the people to use, particularly for scientific research, a lot more 3d scanning of large objects, but also imaging of of objects as well, so that people can discover what we've got in our collections more will say digitising the data associated with collections as part of that project. So people can access the information around the specimens and the collections much more readily, which is great, because that's how we get the museum out of just its physical location in central London. The advantage we've always got in collections is it's not just a static collection, people think about museum collections was being a static collection of very old, very dusty taxidermy and a lot of pin things. The important part of museum collections is it lets you time travel, the time series of material that we have in here, from material from the 1700s. And earlier in some cases, through to modern material we're still collecting actively now to keep that time series alive means that you can look at changes in flowering time, you can look at changes in distribution, changes in abundance, changes in our understanding of species, morphology of species may change over time. And obviously, when we're working in a changing environment and changing climate, that's vital information to know. And we can't do that without that time series of information. So it's critical that we keep collecting material, but also that we look at new ways that material can be used. So one of the projects we're working on at the moment is going to be around full genome sequencing of material from the UK, that's entirely revolutionary. The ability and the speed with which we can full genome sequence material now is unprecedented. So we need to be ready to collect and to hold that kind of material. You may have seen quite a lot of press material that came out a couple of weeks ago, around a field trip that we took up near Liverpool, deliberately collecting material, but collecting it straight into liquid nitrogen so that we preserve all the jet genetic material, and therefore the quality of that material for the future. So that we can go off and we can sequence material, but we've got the material, I presume that it requires a different type of storage to what we're used to. So that we're having to work on. And different ways of collecting and all sorts of things, but very much it's about making sure that the museum collections are ready for future technology as that comes through and being very much part of the development of that technology, because it is going to change how we do conservation. And the museum is very much at the forefront of doing that at the moment.

Steve Roe: 19:48

And looking forward to the next generation of bat conservationists. How many of the children who visit the museum take a genuine interest in bats? Is it more difficult to foster interest in less obvious and colourful taxa such as books rather than Say that it's all flowers.

Steph West: 20:03

I think the second you get it, it doesn't matter if it's a young person at your if it's an adult, I've, once you actually physically show people something, they're incredibly curious. And you can have everything from, you know, someone's screaming because they've just seen a moth, even though it's quite clearly got a pin through it, and it has done for quite some time. And I've had that through to actually being able to watch video clips of bats emerging from roosts or, you know, seeing a taxidermic bat in the hand, people almost instantly get fascinated. And once they're fascinated, they're curious, someone once told me, you can't be both curious and afraid, the two can't coexist. So as soon as you got the curiosity, the fear around bats, or which does still happen, all fear and moths, and things like that goes away. And people get fascinated, and there are so many in depth stories about behaviour that it's always going to hook people in. It's just having that opportunity in that vehicle, to be able to show people what it is about bats that's going to fascinate them as an individual, and knowing how to communicate that. And once they've got that fascination, they're hooked. And they'll always take that little snippet of information away with them, even if they don't do anything with it, it's always going to be there, and always going to think slightly differently. So the opportunity that this role, even though I'm not working on that specifically in the museum, the opportunity I've had to hook people into bat conservation, changed their minds a little bit about those terrifying animals flying around in the dark. It's, it's been a fascinating opportunity to do that, and really shows the value of good communication, and the value of having collections that you can put in some in front of someone put in their hand and go, that's amazing. This is why I love it. It's why you should love it as well.

Steve Roe: 21:58

And what is it about the nocturnal world that you love so much.

Steph West: 22:03

It's still so unexplored. Often, when you're out doing bat surveys, you feel like you've got the whole world to yourself. So you don't let your imagination wander while at certain points. But you feel like it's it's just you and the wildlife out there. When you're sat out there doing about survey sometimes. And I love that connection with nature, that fact that you're, you're getting a glimpse into a secret world is hidden from so many people. And he's fascinating and is complex, and is full of different social interactions and complexity around predator prey interactions and all that sort of stuff. I find that as exciting and amazing as when I first discovered it when I was a kid. And I genuinely hope that never goes away. And I Yeah, 41 I can't see that happening now. I think I'm hooked.

Steve Roe: 22:52

And what do you wish you'd known when you started as a bat surveyor that you know now? Oh,

Steph West: 22:57

that's a good question. Never forget the coffee. First that this fascination interest is always going to be a part of who you are. And just to not hate try and hide the geek. Just yeah, it's absolutely part of who I am. And to just be okay with that.

Steve Roe: 23:27

And finally, which three words would you use to describe the bat conservation movement?

Steph West: 23:35

Passionate, everybody I always come across when they're working with bats. They are the most enthusiastic, wonderful people I ever get to meet. Science lead. I know that's a cheating. It's two words, but it's hyphenated. But a lot of what we do around bat conservation is so driven by science is always had to been if we want to research bats, we've got to have bat detectors and now thermal imaging and infrared video and all sorts of things coming through. And we've always been very much led by the science, which is great. And we love talking to people about that, whether they want to hear about it or not. But we love talking to people about that. So I think that's one of our biggest strengths.

Unknown: 24:22

Great stuff. Steph West, thank you very much.

Steph West: 24:24

Thank you very much.

Unknown: 24:26

That was Steph West biodiversity training manager at the Natural History Museum. Next time I talk with the museum's curator of mammals, Rodrigo Portella Miguez, about how he helped describe a new species of bats, which had previously lain undiscovered on a shelf in the collections for 30 years.

Rodrigo Portella Miguez: 24:40

I knew that there was a colleague of mine from Thailand coming to visit and he was particularly interested in going to LA Fitness in general. We had a look at one of the species that was there, and then he's noticed that particular specimen was quite different from the rest. He said, Oh, maybe this is a new species. So what do we need to do in order to To verify this

Steve Roe: 25:02

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