HUMI – Suva’s evolutionary path
How are we establishing HUMI Suva
Figuring out how to transform microbiome ecology, human health and education – at the same time!
- What does microbiome biodiversity have to do with human health?
- What does studying the above have to do with education?
- What does citizen science have to offer these apparently diverse topics?
This is a site dedicated to charting a journey of how to move the arenas of microbiome biodiversity, human health and progressive education of primary and secondary students in a coherent manner.
The premise is relatively simple. Microbiome biodiversity is correlated with better human health indices.
Broadly speaking, urban areas that are not deliberately designed to increase microbiome biodiversity tend to have poorer health indices than those that do, or with their rural counterparts.
There is a space to show case these relationships in finer detail by using concepts in citizen science. Once such group is primary and secondary school children who embark on this project.
We are trialing this concept of using citizen science concepts in microbiome bio diversity and human health in Suva, the capital city of the Fiji Islands.By cataloguing our journey, we hope we can establish a solid roadmap in which to offer other groups embarking on this or similar projects.
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Perfect ‘Disaster’ in HUMI-Suva’s 1st Data Collection
So finally we did it! We started collecting soil from around Suva. Mark the date because it was the 22nd of February. As I said to the students at the time, whatever we felt about the actual trip, the actual event was the first of a project that would last a minimum of five years…
Longitudinal Studies and this time Period (aka climate change)
HUMI-Suva is a project that is deliberately aimed as being a longitudinal study. The initial goal is to collect data for 5 years. Mainly as a settling programme and ensuring that our partners are in fact on-board with our data collection and so on. We think 5 years is a good goal to have regardless,…
Citizen Science or Science for Citizens
Citizen science has some impressive success stories, where citizens collect data for scientists to analyse, normally under conditions that the scientists could not afford to collect as much data, or collect data from certain locations (or both). One of the more dramatic ones is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Although it started within NASA…
HUMI Suva 