NUI Galway will host a Placemaking Symposium and Workshops as part of the Architecture at the Edge (AATE) celebration of exceptional architecture in the West of Ireland on Friday, 26 October. The event will take place in the O’Donoghue Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance from 9.30am to 5pm. This year’s Placemaking Symposium and Workshops will focus on the regeneration of Nun’s Island, led by NUI Galway with support from the urban design team at BDP, and the recent announcement of Galway City Council’s own Public Realm strategy. These two important initiatives will have a profound influence on the shaping and the future of Galway.  The symposium will include presentations and discussion in the morning, followed by an afternoon of workshops on Nun’s Island, Galway’s Public Realm Strategy, and Placemaking in Towns and Villages. Keynote presentations will be delivered by Gareth Maguire, Architect Director of BDP, Caroline Phelan, Senior Planner with Galway City Council and Simon Wall, Senior Executive Architect of the Mayo County Council. Coordinator of the event and NUI Galway Professor Kevin Leyden said: “Placemaking is all about working together to plan and build inviting places that inspire creativity, culture, sustainability and community and attract businesses and residents alike.” The afternoon workshop on placemaking in towns and villages, led by Simon Wall, town architect in Westport, will explore the experience of smaller communities in the west of Ireland and address the challenges and opportunities in shaping their future. Whether in the dramatic landscape which attracts visitors or the farmed environment supporting the local economy, the revitalisation of smaller towns and villages and their environs is of vital importance for the entire region. The Placemaking Symposium and Workshops is free and open to the public but advance registration is essential at https://www.architectureattheedge.com/new-events/2018/10/26/placemaking.  For more information on the AATE festival and the events taking place visit https://www.architectureattheedge.com/. -Ends-

Dogfish (Scyliorhinus canicula), which are an abundant small shark species in Irish coastal waters, have been shown to have a very varied diet, preferring soft-bodied animals over crabs and fish, according to a new study by marine scientists at the Ryan Institute in NUI Galway. The study was published in the Journal of Fish Biology.  Previous studies which were purely based on examining what is found inside the stomach of a dogfish had described these sharks as mainly feeding on crabs and fish. In this new study, the researchers extracted muscle tissues from these sharks and analysed them using chemical tracers, called stable isotopes, to determine whether these ecologically important predators actually feed on other prey types. Using a combined approach of novel chemical tracers and analysis of the stomach contents of the dogfish, the researchers were able to show that these small sharks feed mainly on soft-bodied animals such as sea squirts and other soft-bodied organisms. The reason crab and fish prey might have been over-estimated in the past is because these hard-bodied prey types tend to be over-represented in the dogfish’s stomach contents due to their slower rates of digestion. Dogfish are one of the most abundant sharks and can be found from Norway down to western Africa and are common along all Irish coasts. In contrast, other species of predatory fish such as cod, are described to be on the decline due to an increase in heavily-overfished areas worldwide. Alina Wieczorek, lead author of the study from the Ryan Institute at NUI Galway, says: “It is important to know what dogfish feed on because with the decrease in commercially important fish, these small sharks are likely to become the top predators of our future coastal ecosystems.” The researchers were able to infer from a muscle sample of the shark what it primarily had been feeding on in the preceding 200 days. This is due to the fact that some chemical tracers of elements such as carbon accumulate in different ratios in the animal’s tissue, depending on what they have been feeding on. The higher up the foodchain an organism feeds, the more carbon stable isotopes can be found its tissues. Alina Wieczorek, added: “A vegetarian, for instance, would have less of the heavier carbon in their muscle than someone who prefers a meaty diet. So the sentence, ‘You are what you eat’ isn’t that far-fetched.” The research article resulted from Ms Wieczorek’s undergraduate project which was supervised by Dr Anne Marie Power, and was carried out during the final year of her B.Sc. in Marine Science at NUI Galway.  Professor Mark Johnson, the coordinator of the B.Sc. Marine Science course at NUI Galway, explains: “We feel it is important that teaching should be research-led and this is a great example of how undergraduate students can produce high quality research during their final year projects.” This research was funded as part of the NEPHROPS project (www.nephrops.eu) by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme.  To read the full study in the Journal of Fish Biology, visit: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jfb.13770 -Ends-

NUI Galway’s Colin O’Dowd, Professor in the School of Physics and Director of the Ryan Institute’s Centre for Climate and Air Pollution Studies (C-CAPS) was recently elected last week to the Academia Europaea, the pan-European Academy of Humanities and Sciences. Election to the Academia Europaea is widely considered to be one of the highest honours that a European scientist or scholar may receive and is by invitation only. Its formation was initiated in 1988 by the Royal Society and supported by the key National Academies across Europe. During this announcement Professor O’Dowd was also a recipient of NUI Galway’s 2018 President’s Award for Research Excellence in the Established Researcher category. Academia Europaea elects into membership scientists and scholars of international distinction and who have demonstrated sustained academic excellence in their field of research. Professor O’Dowd who is only the second NUI Galway academic to be elected, was elected to the Earth and Cosmic Science section and is one of the leading experts in the area of air pollution, atmospheric composition and climate change. He has published extensively on this topic and has been listed as being in the top 1% most cited researchers in his field, a category also regarded as hosting the world’s most influential scientific minds. In addition, he was a contributing author to the last inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report.  In addition, Professor O’Dowd has the distinction of being a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society and a Fellow of the Institute of Physics. These awards add to his portfolio of previous awards comprising the Royal Meteorological Society’s Mason Gold Medal, the Institute of Physics Appleton Silver Medal, the Royal Irish Academy’s Gold Medal in Geoscience and the German Aerosol Society’s Smoluchowski Award. Professor O’Dowd is Director of the Centre for Climate and Air Pollution Studies which operates the Mace Head Air Pollution and Climate research station near Carna in Co. Galway along the Atlantic coastline. Mace Head is one of the most renowned research stations worldwide, having started discrete research campaigns 60 years ago to measure how clean the air entering Europe, or, more precisely, monitoring how polluted the cleanest air in Europe has become. It is a World Meteorological Organisation Global Atmosphere Watch station and provides realtime and webcast data for air pollution and greenhouse gases on a 24-7 basis (see http://co2.climate-kic.org/). It’s long term (35 year) continuous air pollution, greenhouse gas, and ozone depleting substances records, are critically important for informing clean air and climate change policy. For more information about Mace Head, visit: www.macehead.org. -Ends-