The 3D lab

Botanical scouting

Posted on April 12, 2023 by lembrechtsjonas

I spent a beautiful spring day last week in one of Brussels’ most fairy-tale-like places: the botanical garden Jean Massart.

Springtime visits to the botanical garden, that’s abundant flowers wherever you look! Here: Fritillaria meleagris, a rare species planted – and thriving – in the botanical garden

This little piece of biodiversity sits in a picturesque valley bordering the E411 highway and that famous chunk of Brussels forest called the Sonian Forest.

Of course, I wasn’t there just for the picture-perfect flowers: I was there to do some scouting for a potential new – and pretty exciting – project. If we get it all figured out, we’d be using this beautiful garden as our laboratory for an important research question: can botanical gardens play a role as microclimate refugia in urban areas?

The botanical garden hosts some replicas of highly biodiverse grasslands, so typical – and endangered – for Flanders. One of the show-offs on this April afternoon was this Primula veris

Requirements for this are two-fold: a vast range of microclimatic conditions, resulting from a highly heterogeneous landscape, and a high biodiversity.

A patch of relatively dense forest at the bottom of a valley, the dream-location for stable and relatively cool microclimatic conditions, even close to the city of Brussels

If all goes well, we’ll find both these requirements fulfilled at the botanical garden Jean Massart, but the extent of both remains to be quantified. That’s all I’ll say about it now, so stay tuned for hopefully the start of something new and promising!

Anemone nemorosa was thriving in the forest understory

If you say Flemish forest in spring, you say Hyacinthoides non-scripta

Posted in Belgium | Tagged Botanical garden, Botany, Ecology, Flowers, Forest, Hiking, Microclimate, Nature, Outdoors, Plants, Spring, Walking | 1 Comment

ForestClim – bioclimatic variables for forest understory

Posted on April 7, 2023 by lembrechtsjonas

Those bioclimatic variables that we ecologists all love so much, but at a higher resolution and from right there where your study organisms are living? Wouldn’t that be a dream come true?

Time to pinch yourself, as we now released ‘ForestClim’, a dataset of all the familiar temperature-related bioclimatic variables, at a 25 x 25 m resolution. These bioclimatic variables are representative of conditions at 15 cm above the ground under all of Europe’s’ forest canopies, making them the perfect tool for anyone studying forest understory plants.

*Overview of the different bioclimatic variables in the ForestClim database.*

Now, for the attentive follower, these maps might look familiar. And, indeed, you might have seen at least one of them before: the underlying maps are building further on an earlier publication – by the same amazing PhD candidate Stef Haesen – where we showed a proof-of-concept for these forest microclimate models, based on data from the beloved – at least by me – SoilTemp microclimate database. In that first paper, the model was used to calculate mean annual temperature, but quite some more computer power needed to be consumed before we could create the other bioclimatic layers as well.

Now they arrived, and they are free for all to use, as it should be. So, off you go, go model some forest plant distributions using this neat new toy!

What temperatures are the bluebells of the famous Flemish ‘Hallerbos’ truly experience? Ask our high-resolution ForestClim-maps!

Posted in Science | Tagged Climate, Forests, Microclimate, Nature, Outdoors | Leave a comment

The efficiency of microbes

Posted on April 5, 2023 by lembrechtsjonas

In order to truly understand climate change, we have to understand the carbon cycle – which describes where that notorious element called ‘C’ is moving to. In order to understand that carbon cycle, we need to know who is using that carbon, when and how much. As it turns out, that’s a rather complicated knot to disentangle.

In a recent paper led by Anita Risch, we took a look at the role of some of the more elusive players in that whole business of carbon cycling: soil microbes. Soil microbes play a surprisingly big role in that story, but exactly hów big remains – as so often – hard to grasp. What is known is that soil microbial processes play an important role in the build-up and maintenance of the big chunk of carbon that’s stored in our soils. At the same time, however, soil microbes RELEASE a bunch of carbon into the air via a process called ‘heterotrophic respiration’, best understood as the breathing out we humans also do.

Grassland soils (here at an experimental site in South-Africa) store surprising amounts of carbon (All pictures by the NutNet-network)

From a climate change perspective, one would want microbes to store as much carbon in the soil, and to ‘breath out’ as little as possible. That balance can roughly be considered the ‘efficiency’ of the soil microbial respiration. In a recent paper, we set out to test what defines that efficiency.

For this assessment, we made use of a fantastic global experiment called NutNet, where scientists took natural grasslands and manipulated the amount of nutrients and herbivores. Then, the scientists from 23 grassland sites took a soil sample and sent it to the lab for a five-week laboratory experiment to assess microbial respiration.

So what did we find? Microbes – at least those in grassland soils – did not seem to care too much about nutrient addition and/or exclusion of herbivores. Indeed, both factors did not significantly affect their efficiency. What they did care about, however, was the local soil and microclimate conditions, which strongly affected that illustrious efficiency.

Herbivory in action in Kilpisjärvi (Finland)

So what to do with this information? Most importantly, perhaps, it explains why local studies across the globe have been finding such contradictory results on the matter. If it is indeed all local soil and microclimate conditions that decide how much microbes respire, it makes sense that each regional study will find a different effect of disturbance factors like nutrient addition or herbivory. A wise lesson again for us all: ecology can be darn complicated.

Posted in Science | Tagged Carbon, climate change, Ecology, Grasslands, Nature, Nature photography, Science | Leave a comment

Smart time management for the overwhelmed postdoc

Posted on April 4, 2023 by lembrechtsjonas

Look, I am an ambitious young scientist, but I don’t want to be swamped by work. Witha young family, I know all too well how challenging it can be to juggle work and personal responsibilities. I dream of doing all the science I want without sacrificing precious time with my family.

Enter: smart time management. When my wife introduced me to Motion, a smart time management app that calls itself an “AI executive assistant,” I immediately knew that was EXACTLY what I wanted.

After trying Motion out for a week, I was hooked. Although the app does cost money, I am 100% certain that it pays for itself by increasing my productivity and enabling me to achieve my goals without sacrificing quality family time.

Those two will always come first, and smart time management is key to make that work

Motion is essentially a combination of a smart calendar and a to-do list. You input your tasks, estimate how long they will take, and give each one a deadline. Then, you link the app to your calendar and specify when you don’t want to work, and let the artificial intelligence work its magic. Based on your importance rating and deadlines, Motion provides you with the best possible schedule of when to do each task.

The app shuffles your tasks in such a way that as many of them as possible get done before their deadline. It even warns you when certain tasks won’t fit in your schedule, enabling you to adjust and prioritize your to-do list. With Motion, you can swiftly work through tasks with high urgency without losing sight of your long-term plans.

I LOVE IT!

I love that Motion allows you to see immediately if you’ve taken on too many tasks. You no longer have to worry about biting off more than you can chew, as the app makes it clear which tasks you’ll need to drop to stay on track. Additionally, Motion adjusts instantly to changes in your plan, ensuring that you’re always working on the most important tasks.

My schedule for next week. I’m taking two days off for Easter (we had the family holiday last week already), and leave it to the app to figure out how to arrange my tasks around it

Another great feature of Motion is that it enables you to work on low-priority tasks guilt-free, knowing that the high-priority tasks will also be taken care of. This frees up time for me to work on tasks like writing this blog post, which is definitely not a top priority, but still important to me.

Motion also helps you tackle difficult tasks that you might otherwise avoid by breaking them down into manageable chunks and showing you the reward that comes after completion. This makes it easier to stay motivated and work through challenging projects.

However, there are a few downsides to Motion. If you’re too ambitious with your task list, the app might not be able to schedule certain tasks at all, even with a two-week delay. The AI tends to then simply abandon these asks, regardless of how desperately you needed to do them. It thus remains important to keep track of all your tasks to see nothing crucial gets abandoned.

You also need to be good at estimating how long tasks will take. Although I happen to have a knack for this, others may find it stressful to estimate their workload in advance. And finally, you need to have a certain routine to your weeks to make the most of the app. As a father of two young kids, there is some teeth-grinding involved when I see ambitions dropping off the cliff of hopes into the sea of ‘not gonna happen’. Especially a few days of unexpected sick kids at home can make all the apps’ alarms go off. ‘Good’ thing is: all of that would have been in shambles anyway even without the app, and the app allows you to pick up the pieces much more easily.

Despite my overall positive experience with the app, I have not been able to effectively apply it to non-work related tasks, such as painting the garden shed, due to the unpredictable nature of my schedule with young children. It’s difficult to find a window of time when I can fully dedicate myself to these tasks without interruptions, making it challenging to integrate them into the app’s scheduling system.

In short, I think this app is truly what keeps my ambitious to do-list afloat, without sacrificing my family time, and as a scientist with two part-time postdoctoral positions, this app is what keeps me sane.

I’m not saying you should buy it. I’m just saying I will never ever unbuy it :)!

Posted in General | Tagged Academia, Father, Parenting, Postdoc, Science, Time management, Young kids | Leave a comment

Let’s track some noise!

Posted on April 3, 2023 by lembrechtsjonas

I am delighted to announce that starting this month, I have taken up a part-time position as a postdoctoral researcher to lead a groundbreaking citizen science project on noise pollution in urban environments. The project is being co-led by the University of Antwerp, which has made citizen science a core mission, building on the resounding success of our “CurieuzeNeuzen” initiatives. This opportunity is a perfect blend of my expertise in large-scale environmental monitoring, citizen science, and the urban context, even though it takes me beyond my ‘ecology’ comfort zone.

Cities, such as Brussels, Belgium, are filled with a myriad of sounds. While it is evident that all these sounds can have deleterious effects on human health and well-being, very little is currently known about the spatial distribution of these sounds. That is where our project comes in!

As it is a part-time position, I can continue to devote the rest of my time to my beloved SoilTemp microclimate projects. Additionally, this opportunity is not only a tremendous source of enthusiasm, but it also provides me with a chance to remain in academia for a while longer, until I find a more long-term perspective.

All in all, this is a pretty exciting and promising new beginning! While I am still contemplating how much I will share about this new role on this website, as it is somewhat beyond my usual topics, I am convinced that I can pique your curiosity about noise and its risks and opportunities in the most complex and captivating ecosystem of all: the city.

Posted in Belgium | Tagged Cities, Citizen science, Flanders, Noise, Noise pollution, Science, Urban | Leave a comment

Průhonice

Posted on March 23, 2023 by lembrechtsjonas

I just returned from a journey to the stunning neo-Renaissance castle of Průhonice, located just a short bus ride away from the almost as magical city of Prague. But what brought me to such a picturesque location? Well, let me tell you about the meeting we had with the ASICS network.

The castle of Průhonice and its surrounding botanical garden, home to the Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences. A place full of ecological research of the highest level, and an inspiration to its visitors.

The ASICS network is an international group of scientists dedicated to studying the distribution of non-native species in cold environments. These environments include both high latitudes and mountains which, due to their remoteness, often escape our attention. But why is it so important to study non-native species in these extreme conditions?

Over plates of delicious strudel and other Czech delicacies, we delved into discussions about the progress we were making in understanding non-native species’ invasions in these cold environments. We saw stories of beetles on Crozet Island, of springtails on Marion Island, of non-native plants on Svalbard, each tale more exotic than the rest.

The castle not only hosted our meeting, it’s also the scientific home of our colleagues of the Department of Geoecology, better known as the developers of the TOMST TMS4 microclimate sensor. You won’t be surprised to hear I was delighted to visit them and talk microclimate!

While outside the castle walls, the Czech spring was getting into full spring, we discussed how non-native species were dealing with the extreme weather conditions in these environments. We summarized what we knew, and what we still don’t know.

All around us in the botanical garden, springflowers were emerging. With the sun an agreeable 17°C, it was high tide for botany! Here: Hepatica transsilvanica

Despite the challenges, the conclusions of the meeting were promising: we were gathering more data than ever before on the distribution, behavior, and limitations of these species. However, these cold environments remain full of black boxes, and there are still so many aspects that no scientist has ever looked at. For example, have you ever wondered about the invasion of invertebrates in mountains? Few have, so it seems, and the amount of data is worryingly low. We simply don’t know if there are any non-native invertebrates crawling uphill!

The best part is that thanks to ASICS, we now have an ambitious, international, and highly diverse team of dedicated individuals joining forces to answer these questions. We are bringing datasets together, sharing expertise, setting up joint protocols on a global scale. Our hopes are that together, we will not only be able to answer more questions than alone, but that we can also bring the world’s attention to the urgent need for conservation of these remote locations.