Category Archives: General

The Tea Bag Index: simple on the surface, complex beneath

Posted on April 20, 2025 by lembrechtsjonas

Oftentimes the simplest scientific methods hide a whole iceberg of complexity. The Tea Bag Index (TBI) is no exception. On the face of it, it’s brilliantly straightforward: bury some green and rooibos Lipton tea bags, dig them up after about … Continue reading →

Posted in General, Science | Tagged Ecology, Nature, Science | Leave a comment

The graph that surprises nobody

Posted on April 11, 2025 by lembrechtsjonas

Our recent paper in Nature summarizing the work of the Dark Diversity Network contains a simple – and for that reason rather horrifying – graph. It’s not much more than a linear regression, a line through some points: It summarizes … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Biodiversity, climate change, Environment, Nature, Sustainability | 1 Comment

Fieldwork time!

Posted on December 19, 2024 by lembrechtsjonas

It’s fieldwork time again! We have started to enjoy some cold, grey and dark days in the Dutch mud the last weeks, for our new project on the scale at which biodiversity varies (more on that here). Fieldwork in December, … Continue reading →

Posted in General, Netherlands | Tagged Biodiversity, climate change, Conservation, Ecology, Environment, Fieldwork, Monitoring, Nature, Plants, Utrecht Science Park | Leave a comment

Ten practical guidelines

Posted on December 17, 2024 by lembrechtsjonas

One of the biggest dreams when we started the SoilTemp project was not only to bring together all available microclimate data into a single, unified database but also to align how we think about and measure microclimate. Today, we are … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged climate change, Environment, Garden, Gardening, News | Leave a comment

An ecological data hypermarket?

Posted on October 1, 2024 by lembrechtsjonas

For the past five years, I have led SoilTemp, the global database of microclimate data. I have witnessed its evolution from humble beginnings to a robust repository housing close to a 100,000 microclimate time series from around the world, several … Continue reading →

Posted in General, Science | Tagged Climate, climate change, Data, Database, Databases, Environment, Microclimate, Mountains, programming, Science, SoilTemp, sql, Temperature | Leave a comment

Throwback to MEB2024

Posted on September 9, 2024 by lembrechtsjonas

The last week of August was marked in red and bold on many calendars: it was the week of the Microclimate Ecology & Biogeography conference, undoubtedly the most important event of the year for global microclimate research. After this second … Continue reading →