”The only way to reach successful conservation in the long term”
Hello everyone! My name is Kim, I’m from Germany and 24 years old. Currently I am doing my master’s degree in Marine Biological Resources and in order to gain some practical experience I will be working as a volunteer for Montenegro Dolphin Research for the next month and a half. My fascination for cetaceans originates back to when I was five years old and for the first time saw the skeleton of a huge blue whale in a small museum in the Netherlands.
Twenty years, a bachelor’s degree in Biology and a short career as assistant guide for a dolphin watching company later, I am happy to finally get to know the everyday work of a marine mammal researcher. Beside the training in the field methods and data analysis tools, such as ArcGIS and Discovery software, I hope to learn more about public outreach and how to engage and encourage people in doing good for the Montenegrin dolphins and the environment. In my second week I took part in a field expedition to Albania, and while we were surveying many people approached us, interested in what we were doing. Unfortunately, we couldn’t speak the language to explain exactly what we were doing. Nevertheless, experiences like this motivate me a lot to pursue not a purely scientific career, but to try and combine research with education in my later work because this is in my eyes the only way to reach successful conservation in the long term.
