Proudly introducing: The 3D Lab!

The 3D Lab is a virtual lab. It is not a research group in the strict sense of the word, as it is not a physical lab. Instead, it is the team of scientists, PhD- and masterstudents working with me, Jonas Lembrechts, in chasing the same goals: studying species distributions and their dynamics in a rapidly changing world.

So why create a virtual lab? The answer is simple: to bond, to unite behind a common cause, even when not physically together. I currently co-supervise 3 PhD-students: Ronja, based at NTNU in Norway, Charly, who is housed at Gembloux in Wallonia, and Jan, who works at the University of Antwerp with me. On top of that, there is a varying set of master students involved in projects with us.

Some of us rarely meet each other in real life, yet all of us are tackling similar questions and we are united behind that commong cause to understand what is happening to our biodiversity, before it is to late.

Hence, the virtual lab. We communicate our science together (see for example this first guest post from Charly), we have meetings together and we learn from eachother.

Master student Robin and PhD-student Ronja studying plants together in northern Sweden

For the name and logo, we have to thank Ronja, but I find it very fitting: our work focusses on the dynamics in distributions in 3 dimensions: longitude, latitude, and time. And while we might all be working in different systems – from cities over heathlands to mountains – we all want to discover the dynamics in these distributions. And we are all using the power of statistical analysis to tackle these questions, hence the Gaussian distribution replacing the D.

So, be welcomed on the3Dlab.org, and follow us on our joint quest to discover dynamics in species distributions, while we try to understand the mysteries of our biodiversity before it is too late to save it!