Biodiversity by diversity

Embracing interdisciplinarity is what motivated College of Humanities and Sciences student CHAN Kwai Wei to participate in FoRestore, a sustainability project at Ridge View Residential College (RVRC) which aims to restore native plants and animals in Chestnut Nature Park (CNP), originally a village with vegetable farms and plantations.

Kwai Wei hopes that insights from his diverse courses - Double Majors in Life Sciences and Philosophy alongside Minors in Bioinformatics and Psychology - will broaden his perspectives on scientific endeavours and their value to life.

He shares, “I believe that learning philosophy and psychology has made me more critical of various assumptions and concepts in science, such as the nature of the scientific method and the history of scientific disciplines as well as non-scientific ones. I am thoroughly intrigued by how the scientific scene, especially in evolutionary biology, has changed over the past centuries.”

Kwai Wei and his multidisciplinary team which includes Rachel SIM (Data Science and Analytics, Faculty of Science), Jaclyn CHAN (Cross Disciplinary Programme in Environmental Studies) and students from various programmes under the College of Design and Engineering hope to restore the original forest at CNP which was disturbed by human activities, leading to poor and degraded soil that is not hospitable for native trees.

Starting with salvaging native tree seedlings from the wild and growing them in RVRC’s own nursery, the team then replants them at CNP and conducts monthly weeding maintenance and annual tree growth monitoring sessions.

They also invite members of the public and RVRC students to chip in to the maintenance sessions, which are important to remove sun-loving weeds that enter their plots and compete with the native trees for nutrients. Currently, the team is nursing three reforestation plots at CNP, planted in 2018, 2019 and 2022.

“The FoRestore initiative has benefitted from the creative ideas that the interdisciplinary team generated. Our diverse backgrounds enabled us to contribute varied insights to address environmental challenges in the region,” says Rachel.

Going beyond ideas, “having an interdisciplinary team also means a wider network”, added Jaclyn, describing the collaborations between FoRestore and a host of other organisations.