FOR30050

Individual students carry out a research project on an approved topic in Forestry, under the guidance of one of the Forestry staff members. The student will be expected to make contact with a Forestry staff member with ideas about potential research topics. The student will be expected to investigate an agreed specific problem as part of this exercise Regular progress meetings will be used to guide the student in terms of research topic/problem selection, literature search, development of a methodology, data collection and analysis, presentation of results, development of report structure and outline, report drafting and finalizing.

This module can be taken as a 12-week module in Autumn, and as a 7- or 12-week module in Spring.

This module may also take the form of an essay. The body of the essay should contain about 3,000 words (ca 8 pages at 1.5 spacing), but it should not exceed 4,000 words (about 10 pages). Supporting information, in the form of tables, figures, appendices, and references (etc.) are excluded from this word count. However, the quality of the assignment is far more important than the number of words it contains. This module can be taken as a 12-week module in Autumn, and as a 7- or 12-week module in Spring. Students who register for this module should contact the module co-ordinator in the first week of the trimester they plan to undertake the module to confirm the topic theme. An outline of the essay should be submitted by week 4 (if taken in Autumn) or week 2 (if taken in Spring).