Chile

Chile, South America, land of the Andes. We have a two-year experiment with tiny plant seedlings in the south, close to Punta Arenas. It is the counterpart of our Swedish experiment, where we study factors limiting and promoting plant invasions in cold-climate mountains. The main goal is nicely explained here.

We visited Punta Arenas for the first time in November 2013 to get the experiment started, find useful mountain gradients and sow the seeds of our studied aliens. Wee went back for the first time in March 2014, basically to count how many seeds germinated in every treatment. We will link this germination to the amount of nutrients, soil temperature, surface thermal pictures, the elevation in the mountains and the effect of disturbance.

A last visit to the beauty of Patagonia was payed in April 2015, to finish the experiment and collect the last data for my paper. We enjoyed the Antarctic feel, summer, autumn and winter all in a short period of ten days, thanks to the unique world of the lenga forests.

If you want to read more about my travelling to Chile: ‘travelling the globe’, ‘airplane food’, stories of the whirling Patagonian wind.
Details about the research and the fieldwork can be find in ‘fresh from the field‘, bad luck and ‘small adventures’.
Things worth seeing in Punta Arenas and environment: the cemetery, the dike, the ship graveyards, the dogs, the other side of the peninsula, the southern forests, the birds.
I used my second visit to road-trip a weekend to the marvelous world of Torres del Paine, the so-called eight wonder of the world. A mountain reserve filled with fantastic animals, like guanaco’s, puma’s and all kinds of birds. I tried to visit a penguin reserve, but that failed.