The 3D lab

Arctic Research

Posted on April 6, 2014 by lembrechtsjonas

As a real and enthusiastic researcher in the arctic, I got invited to start blogging for ‘Arctic Research’, the official blog from INTERACT, the EU-supported program that promotes scientific research everywhere in the ice-cold world above the polar circle.

Earlier this year, I received a grant from this program to support our two upcoming summer trips to Sweden. This grant feels in the first place as a confirmation of the quality and importance of our research by the scientific community. It also, more practically, gives me the financial opportunity to take a master student with me on this international experience. I am happy to receive his help and fresh ideas, as well as the chance to teach him the excitement and reality of ecological research in the mountains.

My blogs on the Arctic Research-blog will focus on the adventures of the fieldwork in the north. I will keep you, my readers on Top of the World, informed about interesting things going on there, but my own blog here will stay my main focus for pictures and stories on my mountain/road-studies.

To conclude: I am happy to announce: my first post at the Arctic Research-blog!

Posted in General | 8 Comments

Puma

Posted on April 3, 2014 by lembrechtsjonas

I was a lucky guy, I was told by a tour guide with more than 700 visits to Torres del Paine on his count. I had to pack my stuff and hurry to the closest casino to convert that luck to money. He never saw a puma before, on all his ranges, and I found one with barely 3 park-days. He had to thank me above all, because it was me who warned them to stop for the mountain lion in the roadside.

I was on my way back home to the hotel, the last five minutes in the park and with only a few minutes of battery left in my camera. The big cat was lurking in a ditch next to the road. It took him some time to adjust to the situation, enough time for me to stop and take a picture. He disappeared behind a bush, keeping a close eye on every of my movements.

I got one more chance as the puma quickly crossed the road to disappear in the yellow grass at the other side. A yellow cat in yellow grass, in less than 3 seconds, he was nowhere to be seen… I had to take a deep breath, and shout out my happiness all the way home.

— This post is one in a serie of posts on Torres del Paine in the Andes, the eight wonder of the world, where I spent an incredible weekend after my week of fieldwork in Punta Arenas. —

Posted in General | 3 Comments

Guanaco’s

Posted on April 1, 2014 by lembrechtsjonas

The uncrowned kings and queens of the Andes…

They are everywhere, lazily grazing the short savannah-grass, staring indifferently at passing cars. They crowd the lowlands in large herds, they appear on the highest peaks just like that. They even block the roads whenever they feel like crossing, or just want to emphasize their superiority.

I already love them, with their long eyelashes and funny faces. As soon as you see them, you know they definitely belong here, in the Andes. They feel the mountains as nothing else, they fit in the landscape like a key in a lock.

I bow my head and kindly ask for permission to disturb their land. They nod, lower their eyelashes and run-walk-hobble away on their long legs, fluffy tail in the air.

— This post is one in a serie of posts on Torres del Paine in the Andes, the eight wonder of the world, where I spent an incredible weekend after my week of fieldwork in Punta Arenas. —

Posted in Chile | Tagged Abroad, Adventure, Andes, Animals, Chile, Guanaco's, Mammals, Mountains, Patagonia | 1 Comment

Road trippin’

Posted on March 29, 2014 by lembrechtsjonas

Me and my hired Nissan saw a growing friendship with every kilometer added to the counter. Without ever fearing a nasty bump or dangerously steep slope, he has shown me all the most beautiful parts of Chilean Patagonia, the land of endless roads through coin-flat grasslands and majestic mountains.

For a guy from Belgium, the wideness of Patagonia is mind-blowing. At home, it is almost impossible to follow a straight road with your eyes until it disappears behind the horizon. It happens even more rarely that you stand on top of a mountain and see the road whirling around the mountains in the distance, every now and then vanishing and appearing again over and behind yet another slope.

Discovering the world by road stays ever fascinating. In Chile, it turns out to be one of the best ways of travelling. You get all the nice views, and all the wonderful animals only a heartbeat away, like this guanaco.

It will however always be important to stay aware of the large effect of the roads on nature, like I described before. Chile clearly showed me another inevitable road effect in the shape of roadkill. The Patagonian roads seem to score bad on this, with dozens of ended lifes of hares and rabbits. Especially at night, the hares cross by thousands, making them almost impossible to avoid.

Of course, there is always the other side… Roadkill creates a real paradise for birds of prey, as they get served their rabbit as a fastfood happy meal.

Posted in General | 7 Comments

Small adventures from far, far away

Posted on March 24, 2014 by lembrechtsjonas

Every field ecologists hopes for field days with only few dramatic adventures. We were lucky, because there is almost no destitution to share, or it should be the thousands and thousands of sticky plants that hooked on to our clothes like the best velcro, only to fall apart in even more sticky pieces when you tried to remove them. But if that is the worst…

For a minute, it seemed to have gone wrong when we saw the family of cows that had made our plot into its favorite walking route. The result: knocked-over labels, deep tracks in the plots, angry cow faces looking at us, intruders and cowpats everywhere. Luckily, all our seedlings were strong enough to survive the trampling and limit the drama.

Nothing else could stop us from collecting data that at first sight already seems to agree seamlessly with our hypotheses. This realisation makes our days in the Chilean nature even better and pays off the effort we had to put in to get to the other side of the world.

But only when you are here, you start to realize how important our work on alien plant invasions really is. The Chilean nature – through tourism one of the main posts of the Chilean economy – is becoming completely infested with aliens. Close to the important harbor of Punta Arenas, it turns out that almost half of the vegetation is from European origin, with millions of dandelions, clover, daisies, ordinary European grasses and many more, all trying to elbow out the native vegetation.

Our work will help predicting the impact of the aliens on this main source of income for the Chileans, which makes it highly relevant.

Posted in Chile | Tagged Abroad, Adventure, Aliens, Experiment, Field ecology, Fieldwork, Punta Arenas, Subantarctic | 3 Comments

Fresh from the field!

Posted on March 23, 2014 by lembrechtsjonas

The first day of fieldwork was long and intense, but nothing less than a success. It was a relief to find back our plots where we had left them behind 4 months ago. It was an even bigger relief to see some tiny seedlings sprouting everywhere between the late summer vegetation. And than I did not even mention the feeling when you finally find your tiny, coin-sized temperature sensors more than ten thousand kilometers away from home!

Of course, no mountain ecology without adventures! We had to drive up the jeep on a crazy bumpy mountain road, speckled with puddles that where almost to deep to cross and every now and then blocked with fallen trees. All day, we had to fight rain and howling winds and protect our instruments against the elements. Luckily, an almost permanent rainbow watched kindly over our efforts. We saw it as a good sign for our field campaign, with the unspoken promise that our adventures would all be surmountable.

We asked the rainbow for some wildlife, and it seemed to have listened, because we found a wild puma! Or wait, a fierce look in your cute eyes is maybe not enough to make you one…