Summer 2020 is now in full swing, and that means our trial for our garden microclimate project is in full swing! Let me guide you through some of the plans with some awesome pictures:
Lawns, lawns, lawns! We plan to fill thousands of lawns in Flanders with our ‘garden daggers’ (TOMST TMS4 microclimate stations). This summer, we already have up to 50 gardens equiped to monitor drought (here a picture from this springs’ long drought) and heat
We are teaming up with some other ongoing climate measuring initiatives, among which the super awesome Leuven.cool community science project. They measure urban heat islands effect in air temperature, we match our loggers on and in the soil, to study vertical gradients in temperature.
We use these set-ups from Leuven.cool also to test small-scale variation: how much does temperature and moisture vary within a few meters in a lawn? How wide of a circle can we capture using one garden dagger?
We have gardens ranging from the very center of the city – here a view from the ‘Begijnhof’ in the center of Leuven – to the more rural parts of the country, allowing us to test for the effect of garden location on patterns in drought and heat
No project on soil moisture and temperature without soil samples! We dig up soil in all the gardens we are studying, to study soil texture and carbon storage potential
Looking forward to see what these trials will bring, and so ready to roll out this project in full next year!
The 3D lab 