The 3D lab

Travelling

Posted on January 16, 2014 by lembrechtsjonas

The future looks bright! There is some new traveling on the way and I am already looking forward to share the experience with you all.

Next month will start with a visit to the Canary Islands, some volcanic rocks in the ocean close to the African coast. Although it will not be a work trip, I am still excited to see the plant life, because on a volcanic island, ALL species are aliens, can you imagine!? Most importantly, the islands have two things I really like: the view of impressive mountains and the infinite ocean everywhere.

A rocky shoreline, it won’t get much better!

Next, in March, there is a returning trip to Chile. If luck is on my side, I finish the fieldwork in the shortest possible time, which will give me the chance to bring a visit to the Andes, as that mountain range clearly speaks to the imagination. I have only seen them from a distance on my last trip, but I am planning to fix that problem!

Mountains, awesome high mountains, begging for a visit

Mount Tarn, a lonely mountain on the southernmost part of the Andes.

I can not wait to leave the boring cold Belgian rain behind and go back to the wide views of wild nature!

Posted in General | Tagged Abroad, Adventure, Andes, Mount Tarn, Mountains, Ocean, Punta Arenas, Travelling | 6 Comments

An attractive straight line

Posted on January 14, 2014 by lembrechtsjonas

I was able to convert my love for the fairy-like world of the mountains in a fantastic daytime job, something I am really grateful for.

However, I am equally much in love with the overwhelming power and complex simplicity of oceans, seas, lakes and all kinds of rivers and streams (as long as it involves water).

Although it does not match closely with mountain invasions (sadly), I take every possible chance to incorporate this other passion in what I am doing. Rocks and water are luckily not an impossible combination, as I showed you the beauty of mountain lakes and the street of Magellan.

Still I am always very happy when I can use my free time to bring the sea an extra visit. These pictures are from a holiday visit to the Belgian coastline. It is not the most wonderful coast in the world, but if you take your time to enjoy and you have the weather on your side, it turns into a highly attractive straight line.

Posted in Belgium | Tagged Belgium, Coast, Holidays, Ocean, Sea, Sunset, Water | 6 Comments

Back in time

Posted on January 9, 2014 by lembrechtsjonas

An alien is a species that is introduced in an area where it did not occur naturally.

That’s it. A simple definition (although it is only one in a million) and easy to work with! If a plant grows somewhere where you could not find him before, you may call him ‘alien’.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of problems with this simple definition. As always, nature is too stubborn to fit in the nice scientific framework that we want to press on it.
Just one example: how do you know a plant was absent from an area before?

Many aliens were introduced together with our western way of agriculture, which is somewhere from the 16th century onwards. But data from this period are horribly scarce (going back more than 30 years is already a little disaster!). We rely on the lists of some lonely historic plant freaks, who marked down the species they saw in their gardens. But this kind of freaks where scarce, and they definitely failed in writing down everything that grows!

Following agriculture has proven to be a very rewarding strategy for aliens

That is why the field of Paleobotany is so extremely important in keeping the rest of ecology smoothly on the rails. They make their way through the piles of dusty historical data to reconstruct the history of all species.

There is a wonderful website that collects global historic occurrence data. I like to choose some of my study species and watch how they slowly take over the world. (Follow here the dandelion, for example).

Dandelion-distribution around 1930…

… after the ’60…

… and today!

I especially like how these dandelions take over New Zealand, Japan and all these remote islands in the middle of the ocean. Check also the huge expansion in the Americas (where it should NOT be!). The chance that they flew on their own little wings all the way to Hawaii is very unlikely. There is a much larger probability that we, humans, are involved.

Dandelions flooding a field in southern Chile

There comes a small warning with the use of this kind of data: although it beautifully shows the presence of the plants, it is extremely difficult to prove its ABSENCE. As you can see, data from before 1930 are quiet scarce, not because dandelions were a rare species, but just because nobody wrote its occurrence down! We should thus be very careful in the use of this information.

Posted in The research | Tagged Agriculture, Aliens, Dandelion, Databases, Ecology, gbif, Paleobotany, Plants, Research, Science | 7 Comments

Submitting

Posted on January 6, 2014 by lembrechtsjonas

Submitting your first paper is a thrilling thing.

For several very long weeks, I stared every free moment at my mailbox like this:

Displeased ostrich

But on new year’s eve, when I least expected it, I finally got the releasing e-mail with the word ‘Accepted’ in it. And then I looked more like this:

Extremely happy ostrich

Of course there is still a lot of revising that needs to be done, but every little step is a victory. And as a scientist, your first ‘Accepted’ is a major break-through!

Posted in Belgium | Tagged Accepted, Ostrich, Paper, Publication, Research, Science, Submitted | 12 Comments

The lake of the trolls

Posted on January 4, 2014 by lembrechtsjonas

A serious candidate for ‘most impressive place of the world’:

At the far end of the valley of the trolls lies a lake. It is the clearest lake of Sweden and surrounded on all sides by steep mountains. It barely sees the sun and stays frozen until far in July. On the coldest days, trolls use it to go ice-skating.

I visited the lake on one of the few moments in the year it actually saw the sun. It was a wonderful clear sky, you could see all 34 meters towards the very bottom of the lake and everything felt like summer.

The color is an incredible clear blue, which matched perfectly with the orange and red of the upcoming autumn.

The indescribable feeling if you stand on one of these steep slopes and overlook the amazing view, that’s the exact reason why I love the mountains so much. It is a world full of this kind of wonderful surprises, something from which I can never get enough.

Check out the picture gallery ‘Abisko’ on the right side of my blog, it show more of these fantastic mountain views!

Posted in Sweden | Tagged Abisko, Abroad, Adventure, Autumn, Lake, Mountains, Plants, Subarctic, Sweden, Trolls | 1 Comment

Trolls (!)

Posted on January 1, 2014 by lembrechtsjonas

I start the year with a nostalgic post about my visit to Sweden in July to cheer up those brave Scandinavians in the far north that don’t have much daylight at the moment.

There is this one valley in Lapland where trolls are still living. It is allowed for tourists to visit the area, but great care should be taken not to disturb them. They have their forts on top of the mountains, from where they trow large rocks at each others’ head over the valley. The valley itself is a total chaos of fallen rocks without any structure or organization, which results in an impressive landscape.

If you walk there, between the huge rocks and with the towering mountains everywhere around you, it is easy to believe trolls are wandering through the cold mountains of Lapland. No wonder the mythology is still so alive in Scandinavia. Especially in the dark winter nights, the impressive power of the valley of Kärkevagge could easily result in stories about monstrous men.

A lot of the more strangely shaped rocks are not thrown by the trolls, no, they are trolls themselves. If touched by direct sunlight, they immediately petrify, as the lucky hobbit Bilbo Baggings knows everything about. They are everywhere in the Scandinavian mountains, those trolls that were to slow and surprised by the rising of the sun.