Team:FCB-UANL/Human Practices
Our city is located in a region named "Sierra Madre Oriental" (S.M.O.). The S.M.O. is a mountain chain with an approximate length of 1,350 kilometers, crossing eight states in the north of the country to join the Neovolcanic Axis. Its area represents 11% of Mexico's continental territory1. In this region, there are 189 species of flora and fauna, 73 of which are endangered, threatened, endemic or under special protection2. It also houses more than 7% of Mexico's endemic plants, making it an area of great ecological significance3.
There’s an evident necessity of our ecosystems conservation; that’s why, with experts, companies and institutions’ help, we intend to create the first ecologically friendly firefighting foam, and also educate people about the importance of science development and forestal ecosystems conservation.
By expressing recombinant proteins naturally produced by a frog species from our locality in our project, we show the importance of wildlife conservation in its ecosystems. It provides us useful resources that could go undiscovered. We believe that the same species that are threatened by the loss of their habitat could be the ones that can give us the tools to protect it. We also hope that projects like ours make people reflect on local ecosystems' economic, social, and ecological importance.
UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM
We define the stakeholders as people involved directly or indirectly in the project. As they might have a lot of experience, their opinion is very important for us to have the best version of our foam. Stakeholders were assigned to three different groups through a value matrix, where we evaluated many relevant areas using a 0-2 scale in order to determine the priority and influence in the project.
Once we defined the importance of each group, we started looking for interviews with them, in order to get to know the problem better. While doing that, we noticed there are no foam producers in our country; we even tried to contact international producers (this was made with the help of DTU-Denmark team), but we didn’t receive an answer. Nevertheless, we managed to contact Amerex, a mexican firefighting foam distribution company, that nicely explained us many important aspects of foam production.
This diagram shows all the stakeholders and experts we managed to contact and how their feedback helped us shape our project in our interest areas.
This year, we took a special interest in making sure that our stakeholders felt safe when sharing information with us. Thus, we developed a letter of consent in which we, as a team, establish what kind of information we want to gather, the security measures we took to safeguard it, contact with our university, among other things. Because of the lack of knowledge about these processes, we have decided to share a template of the letter, as a contribution for other teams.
We used this document in every interview we made according to what is established in the Human Practices HUB.
Amerex
Parques y Vida Silvestre de Nuevo León
Lic. Lucía Florido Aguilar
Eng. Marco A. Vergara Santana
Master in Superior Education Oliverio Sánchez Cervantes
M.C. Gloria Elisa Vallejo Maldonado
César Manuel Sánchez Rodríguez
SHAPING OUR PROJECT
Thanks to all the feedback received, we learned a lot about the entire process of wildfires combat, from political regulations to real-time combat. Despite the fact that our initial focus was orientated on the ecological factor, we found out there are a lot of things to improve. In addition, we found out a new area: sell, for which we obtained feedback from Monterrey’s ImpactHub Director César Manuel Sánchez Rodríguez. Things done thanks to his feedback are documented in the Entrepreneurship section.
Some of the activities developed due to these opinions are explained in the following table:
Besides talking with stakeholders, we reached out to some experts in different fields to validate our ideas and get valious feedback.
LBG Shakti Delgadillo
Dr. Leonardo Ríos
Dr. Roberto Olivares
M.Sc. Ediner Fuentes
M. Sc. Ricardo Camilo Chavéz
Eng. Daniel Domínguez
GETTING PEOPLE INVOLVED
After analyzing all the feedback and opinions, along with making the necessary changes in our project, we noticed the lack of knowledge about synthetic biology and ecosystems conservation from the general population. Thus, we decided to make some educational activities because this is a serious problem that puts in risk human lives and ecosystems integrity.
In addition, the development of our law improvement proposal and risk analysis intends to take into account the role people play in these areas, in order to make further efforts to get them involved. These two activities are explained in our safety section.
REFERENCES
[1] Valdez V.; Foroughbakhch R.; De la Garza, J. (2004). Criterios fitogeográficos en la redelimitación del Parque Nacional Cumbres de Monterrey. Ciencia UANL 7 (1):29-34.
[2] Estrada-Castillón AE 2007. Flora del Parque Nacional Cumbres de Monterrey, Nuevo León, México. Facultad de Ciencias Forestales UANL Data base SNIB2010-CONABIO proyecto No. BK036. México, D.F.
[3] Salinas Rodríguez, M. (2018). La Sierra Madre Oriental como reservorio de diversidad vegetal. Revista Ciencia UANL, 21 (88). doi: 10.29105/cienciauanl88.21-4