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Student-driven quantitative review on temporal changes in ecosystem services

Tiny frog sitting on a person's finger. Photo.

During last autumn and winter a team of researchers, PhD students and master students from Lund University and Leuphana University, Lüneburg, joined forces to undertake a student-driven quantitative review on temporal changes in ecosystem services. While the primary outcome of this collaboration will be a review to be published in an international scientific journal, the true added value of the student-driven review format is the great learning experience resulting from integrating students into a research process.

The format of the student-driven literature review was based on two workshops, the first in Lund in October, and the second in Lüneburg in February. The first workshop aimed at gathering literature, agreeing on how to screen the selected 5,600 papers and what information should be extracted from the relevant papers.

“People’s experience from doing quantitative reviews varied from none to very extensive. I think that this, as well as the wide range of knowledge and research fields represented by the participants, helped making the workshops incredibly instructive,” says William Sidemo Holm, PhD student at CEC, Lund University.

The workshop was organised By Johan Ekroos at CEC, Lund University, and Henrik von Wehrden and Anna-Lena Rau at Leuphana University. The team members at Leuphana University have developed the concept as a learning tool for students to conduct quantitative reviews in a systematic manner.

“While this review project is already the fifth that I have taken part in, I am always amazed how many new things one learns about conducting reviews each time”, says Anna-Lena Rau, PhD student at Leuphana University.

“This format offers a great opportunity to integrate students in the research process in an international setting. Students will gain knowledge on how to summarise scientific research in a transparent, quantitative way. It is also quite clear that skimming through 5,600 scientific papers feels quite daunting for an individual researcher, but doing this as a part of a motivated team is definitely more pleasant,” says Johan Ekroos, researcher at CEC, Lund University.