Last week, we started our monitoring campaign for carabid beetles in the botanical garden Jean Massart.

I already introduced that beautiful oasis in the city of Brussels before, and the idea that within this nice, cool and wet patch of nature on the edge of Brussels’ greyest greyness, species might be able to find some crucial microrefugia against the increasingly blasting heat of the urban center.

To tackle this, we installed an extensive network of microclimate sensors across the garden, which will allow us to model microclimate heterogeneity with a high resolution. Next to that, we are checking our hypotheses for two distinct groups of organisms: plants and carabid beetles.

Now, the carabid beetle hunt has gone into full swing. We chose this group because they are relatively straightforward to monitor using pitfall traps, and there was an extensive survey of carabids back in 2015, which can give us very interesting temporal information.

Now, it’s waiting for our first harvest of beetles. For now, the record of being caught the fastest is held by a worm…