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Get a full day-by-day itinerary for Quinta de Sao Pedro, Rua M.F.A, Sobreda de Caparica, Lisboa, P-2815-786, Portugal. in 8th to the 22nd of april. I am going for one of my university modules Module general schedule - subject to change. Day/s Activity Day 1 Meet at Lisbon Airport rendezvous point, travel via coach to Quinta. Dinner and general announcements. Days 2 - 3 Mini-projects, data analyses and student presentations. On afternoon of day 3 the group projects start. Days 4 - 8 Project work. Day 9 Day off. Days 10 - 13 Projects continue, data analyses begins. Day 14 Project symposium with student presentations, final night party. Day 15 Travel home.Dates: April 8th – April 22nd 2026 inclusive. Rendezvous at Lisbon Airport: It is your responsibility to get to Lisbon airport to meet the coach that will take us as a group to the Quinta de Sao Pedro. You should arrange to be at Lisbon airport by 18:30 April 8th 2026. When you arrive, upon leaving the customs-controlled area and entering the main arrivals hall, turn right, walk down the slope towards a large open area inside the main arrivals hall and wait there in a single group for further instructions from staff. See red dot on map below. We will board the coach together and drive approx. 30 mins to the Quinta. See map below for location of meeting point and coach parking area. If you are delayed, call Kate or Tom on the mobile numbers listed on this page (put them in your phone). map of Quinta de Sao Pedro, Rua M.F.A, Sobreda de Caparica, Lisboa, P-2815-786, Portugal. Location: Quinta de São Pedro, Rua do Movimento das Forças Armada, no. 86, 2815-786, Sobreda, Portugal. Check out their website at Quinta de São Pedro what3words code: rifled.roadmap.action GPS Coordinates: 38°38'35.1456"N -9°11'40.8264"W The Quinta is an old farm house situated in grounds of mixed grassland and macchia (shrubland). Some years ago it was converted and equipped as a field research station, principally for botanical and entomological work. The house and associated outbuildings provide dormitory, laboratory and catering facilities and several field projects can be carried out in the grounds themselves. Other sites of interest where project work will take place are within easy walking or driving distance. Food: Meals are at set times and we cater in bulk. Breakfast and lunch are self-catering with provisions being bought in from the local market and baker. Dinner is arranged at local restaurants which are a 15 – 20 min walk from the Quinta, with some meals on the Quinta. If you have special dietary requirements, inform Tom or Kate via the Personal Details form as soon as possible (see also the Welfare, Disability and Inclusion tab below). Travel: You will arrange and pay for your own flights to and from Lisbon Airport, Portugal and travel insurance to cover those flights. You can choose to arrive earlier or stay later than the dates of the course at your own expense and by arranging your own accommodation, but you must not miss the rendezvous time (see the top of this tab) to catch the bus from Lisbon Airport to the Quinta. We will also arrange a coach to return to the airport at the end of the course if enough students wish to travel at the same time. You may not arrive later than the stated rendezvous time and you may not leave earlier than the morning of the final day of the course. If leaving independently on the final day, inform Tom or Kate when leaving the Quinta. Baggage restrictions: You will need to bring all the clothing, personal items, medications and other equipment you will require for 2 weeks of field work. Clothes washing facilities are available, but limited. Please keep yourself informed of the regulations governing airline baggage for the airline you have booked with. If you have prescription medication, please remember to take this in your hand luggage and not in checked luggage. Requirements - You will need to arrange and/or bring the following: Transport between the UK (or elsewhere) and Lisbon Airport, Portugal at the specified times. Travel insurance to cover your travel to and from the field course, and covering any high-risk activities you choose to pursue on the day off. A passport with 3 months validity from the first day of travel. Non-UK and non-EU nationals may require a visa. Have a look on Visa Portugal to see whether you need a visa. Any money you may require – to pay for your drinks, snacks and anything needed for the day off. A credit/debit card with Cirrus or Maestro facilities for use in ATMs is probably best. Note that your card is sometimes needed to swipe to get into banks in the first place. Current immunisation against flu, tetanus, measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) and poliomyelitis. Equipment - You will need to bring the following: Sturdy footwear (e.g. hiking boots or walking shoes. Flip-flops/sandals are not good enough) A mixture of warm and lightweight clothing, including clothing that will protect your arms and legs from scratches from vegetation A broad-brimmed protective sun hat for field work A sleeping bag A towel Sun cream of at least SPF 30 is strongly recommended Waterproof clothing which will keep you dry if working in the rain Notebook and writing equipment (pencils are best when working in the field) Notes/handouts from first year Core Skills statistics, if you have them A sandwich box and reusable drink bottle Ear plugs, if you wish (you will be sleeping in dorms) A mosquito net and/or repellent if you find low-moderate numbers problematic A laptop - we will provide one PC laptop per project group, but you may wish to bring your own A clean and virus-free USB memory stick for swapping files/data etc. Feel free to bring board games, cards, music, musical instruments etc. Mini-projects During the first two days you will be asked to survey the different habitats in and around the Quinta for a particular taxonomic group of interest, and to present the results of your analyses to the class. Details of the exercise are in the 'Mini-projects' tab below. Evening and lunchtime talks During the course there will be a series of talks given by staff members designed to help you make the most of your projects, to introduce you to the life of a scientist, and to teach you a bit about the wildlife you will encounter on the field course. The talks are scheduled to minimise the degree to which they clash with project work, and all students are expected to attend. Projects A residential field course provides the opportunity for intensive, full-time project-style investigation which is simply not possible within the strictures of the normal timetable. Successful field projects, however, need a great deal of careful planning as well as organisation and discipline in making observations and collecting data. What you get out of them in terms of worthwhile results is directly proportional to the thought and effort you put in. We will provide project descriptions on this Moodle page well before the field course starts, and you will have a chance to express a preference before we allocate students to groups. Although the final emphasis of the projects will depend on what is happening when we get there, thinking about your project now will help to identify the sort of questions you might ask and the techniques you might use to try to answer them. To that end, once you have chosen a project, you should discuss it with the member of staff whose name appears on the synopsis. You should arrange a discussion with your project supervisor as soon as you have been allocated a project. The list of references with each synopsis are there to help you get started, and hard copies of previous years' field course reports are available in Tom's office. You should ensure you have done some pre-reading on your project before the start of the course. On the course you have roughly 10 days to collect data and analyse it to a stage where you can present a worthwhile talk on the last day. This means that a sensible division of labour between data collection, collation and analysis during the course is essential. To aid this process, the member(s) of staff supervising each project will seek regular reports on your group's progress. Final analyses and writing up individual reports (see the Assessment tab below) can be completed back at the University.Free time There will be a limited amount of time free at the end of the working day, after we have eaten together. Working hours vary by project, but generally last from 08:30 – 19:30. You will typically be free after about 21:00. We have one day off in the two weeks. During the day off, the University considers you to be on “down-time”. You are covered by the University’s insurance policy during down-time, but only if you abide by the University's Student Code of Discipline. On the day off you are expected to feed yourself. Location: Quinta de Sao Pedro, Rua M.F.A, Sobreda de Caparica, Lisboa, P-2815-786, Portugal. my main project is Project 4: You must be croaking – what are frog calls for? The managers of the field centre recently created a pond/swimming pool which is teeming with life, including the very loud and rather beautiful Iberian green frog (also known as Perez’s frog - Pelophylax perezi, formerly known as Rana perezi). We’ve studied this species for a couple of years, and there are lots of questions to answer about their behaviour and ecology, especially in the spring when we visit, when mating season is in full swing. If you approach the pond carefully, without scaring them, you can see very aggressive males either singing loudly, or in the act of mating or mate-guarding, or busy fighting with rivals over a forlorn-looking female. Individuals appear to signal their social position and/or suitability as a mate using both visual and acoustic cues. I would like to investigate those cues in an attempt to find something out about if/how females choose males (and vice versa perhaps), and what determines who wins when males are fighting for a female. Or we could explore other aspects of frog behaviour: what can we find out about who does what, when and why? We have a number of tools at our disposal to characterise visual and acoustic cues. We can record singing individuals from a distance with a specialist microphone, and analyse the calls. There are several types of calls, and we have made some progress characterising each one, and seeing which behaviours are associated with them. I would like to confirm these findings, and look in more detail at the extent to which some call types are individually distinctive; if they are, they might be signalling something about strength, readiness to mate, or aggression. We can catch individuals that we have recorded calling, and look for correlations between the attributes of the calls and morphological measurements such as body size, mass, leg length etc. We can photograph each individual and use the pattern of lines and blobs on the skin of each individual to identify individuals. This might allow us to find out which individuals are most successful in finding a mate or defending a territory, and find out if this is related to the calls or the skin patterns. There is lots of potential here, because we know very little about the system. You should talk in your group about what you would like to know/do, and have a good look at the literature to see what is already known about this species, and similar ones. Last year’s project will be the most important guide as to what we might do this year. Some suggested references: Read up generally on sexual signalling, intrasexual and intersexual selection. Also have a look at recent papers on frog calls, skin patterns, and sexual behaviour. Here are some useful starter references (I have PDFs of the more obscure ones)