Each year 10 Visiting Academic places are offered to academics from various UK, European, US and Canadian universities.  Visiting Academics have all their field costs covered and the funding gives them the opportunity to see first hand the research facilities and to develop possible research projects.  There are various ways in which the research relationships can be developed:

1.  Funding research projects.  Operation Wallacea funds the field costs and organises the logistics, counterpart scientists where required by the host country and permits for research projects accepted into the programme.    Increasingly these projects are being developed into PhD's and Operation Wallacea is part funding 14 PhD's at Oxford, Cambridge, Essex and other UK universities.

2.  Opportunity for large scale temporal or spatial data sets to be obtained. One of the problems of traditional grant aided research is that such grants tend rarely to enable data sets to be gathered over many years.  Likewise geographical comparisons across different countries are often difficult to fund.  Both of these aspects can however be funded under the Operation Wallacea programme

3.  Collaborating on large scale funding applications.  Operation Wallacea has used the results of the various research programmes to lever US$2 million funding from a range of sources and in collaborations with various universities.

Dissertation Students

You can assist with the scientific programmes by conducting your own project on site. This would enable you to collect data for your senior dissertation or Masters thesis. You would receive expert supervision prior to, and during, your time on site. Information on the types of projects that are available, and the kind of research that you can conduct on each of the expeditions, can be found by following the appropriate "Expeditions" links at the top of the page.

To find out how to conduct your dissertation with Opwall please follow the University link at the top of the page. You can discuss any of the available projects by calling the Opwall office, or by attending the next presentation at your university.

Research Assistants

If you would like to join as a Research Assistant, you must be in or have completed tertiary education, have a keen interest in conservation, and want to do something out of the ordinary with your summer. Most, but by no means all of our Research Assistants are University students. Joining as a Research Assistant enables you to individualise your itinerary by choosing to spend a week each on a range of different terrestrial or marine research projects as well as joining relevant training courses. Relatively few people have field experience working alongside real research projects and the Operation Wallacea research programme offers the opportunity to work with a range of academic teams to strengthen your CV (resume) or to help you decide whether tropical field work is of interest for your career.  Research Assistants are involved in a wide range of tasks on each research topic and help to gather primary data.

The various biodiversity surveys being run as part of the Operation Wallacea programme are mostly carried out by university academics, aided by university undergraduates. However, some tasks need a much greater amount of manpower than this. Without General Surveyors we could not, for example, gather forest structure and habitat data on all 150+ forest research sites in Honduras and in Indonesia, or collect and press large numbers of plant specimens. These tasks are carried out by groups of sixth form students from the UK, and senior High School students in the US and Canada, who must be accompanied by their biology or geography teachers. The groups undertake their own training programme, with in-built tests of the accuracy of the data being collected by each group. This training could cover how to assess forest structure, identify target tree species, monitor turtle breeding, etc. Once trained, you spend the second part of your first week working on the aspects of the overall survey programme for which you have been trained. You also have the opportunity to observe research scientists in the field, and to join some of their these projects when you are not involved in your own data collection. In most cases, General Surveyors spend their second week completing a dive-training or reef ecology course.

Grade level 

Definition of fitness and health risk

1

Capable of trekking up mountains over rough ground for 5 hours with a 15Kg rucksack and no health problems that would require medical assistance in remote camps

2

Capable of trekking up mountains over rough ground for 3 hours with a 15Kg rucksack and no health problems that would require medical assistance in remote camps

3

Capable of trekking for up to 2 hours on well defined footpaths with a 15Kg rucksack and no health problems that would likely require medical assistance.

4

Lower fitness levels than any of the above definitions or with a medical condition that could reduce ability in the field or require emergency evacuation.

How many places are there?

Strict limits have been placed on the numbers of volunteers who can join each of the various projects.  Sometimes these are due to survey restrictions.  For example it is impossible to study macaques in the forests of Sulawesi in groups of more than 4 people.  Sometimes the restrictions are due to logistical reasons, such as boat sizes.

On other occasions though the restrictions are due to cultural sensitivities.  We restrict the numbers of visitors for example that can work in the Anthropology and Fisheries Centre in the Bajo village of Sampela to only 15 in order that the visiting volunteers to the village do not have a detrimental impact on the culture.  

Therefore, the earlier you book the more likely you are to obtain your preferred option.  As a general rule many of the options are full or the site limits have been reached by Christmas, so it is best to make your decision about joining the expeditions before this date.