The 3D lab

MIREN meets in Chile

Posted on November 28, 2022 by lembrechtsjonas

A few hundred kilometers south of Santiago de Chile, nestled in a green valley at the foot of a string of snow-clad volcanoes, lies the ‘Suisandina lodge’, a place that breaths hospitality, with all facilities a mountain ecologist needs to spark a good scientific discussion. It is there, between the chickens, lama, and friendly-but-sad-looking dogs, that our latest MIREN Steering Committee meeting took place.

The native Araucaria and Nothofagus forests in the region are simply breathtaking

MIREN, that is the Mountain Invasion Research Network, the network in which I have been involved since my master’s thesis in 2012 (a loooooong time ago, mind you!). Since 2007 (and I thus since 2012), the network has been maintaining long-term (every 5 years) vegetation monitoring along mountain roads and trails in mountain regions across the globe, with already 17 global regions in 2018 and a whole bunch of new ones being added now in 2022.

Alpine violin species flowering delicately

Such a global network needs an occasional global meeting to put all noses in the same direction. While we have all been working very hard with our survey data from our respective field sites and offices, getting a bunch of people in the same – inspiring – environment for a few days is what is needed for true momentum building.

The team at this years’ MIREN meeting, in a beautiful setting of Araucaria trees and volcanoes. We brought in the MIREN Steering Committee and invited some ‘fresh blood’ to spice up discussions. Picture by Aníbal Pauchard

As you can imagine, this was thus an inspiring week! Discussions on new paper ideas, group coding sessions on long-awaited analyses, and inspirational dreaming about future plans and project ideas, we had it all, dressed with a delicious sauce of Araucaria forests and Andean volcanoes.

The main conclusion of this all was clear: there aren’t many networks out there like our precious MIREN. Global long-term vegetation monitoring in mountains is – to the best of our knowledge – limited to us and our good friends over at GLORIA, who focus on vegetation surveys on mountaintops. That we managed to maintain this monitoring effort for 15 years already despite the lack of any significant funding for the network is a wonderful achievement. Seeing the enthusiasm of existing regions to resurvey, and new regions to establish their own gradients, we are definitely still on the rise!

Refreshing the mind on the young slopes of a volcano

Interested to join the fun? Check out all information on how to do a MIREN survey on our website!

Posted in Chile | Tagged Ecology, Forests, Global change, Invasive species, Landscape photography, Mountains, Nature, Nature photography, Plants, Science | Leave a comment

Frontiers in soil ecology

Posted on November 19, 2022 by lembrechtsjonas

Story accompanying the new paper Eisenhauer et al. (2022) Frontiers in soil ecology—Insights from the World Biodiversity Forum 2022.

There was an almost tangible sense of urgency at the World Biodiversity Forum in Davos, last June. A string of the world’s experts on biodiversity research gathered there under a pleasant mountain sun to discuss the state of and – perhaps even more important – the way forward for our biodiversity in a world under pressure from all sides. A story significantly grimmer than the sunny landscape!

I joined the session on soil biodiversity, that subset of biodiversity hiding underneath our feet and therefore even more obscure than the plants and animals we see aboveground. The consensus of that session was cloudy, yet with clear rays of that sun still shining through: our understanding of soil biodiversity, its drivers, and functioning is rapidly increasing, although there is still a long, long way to go.

To make that long road ahead more concrete for scientists and policymakers alike, we decided to take a step back, have a good thorough discussion and write down the main issues in front of us. The result of that effort is now published in the Journal of Sustainable Agriculture and Environment, summarizing the eight most urgent frontiers in global soil biodiversity to urge the international scientific community to help tackle them.

So what are these big tasks to tackle urgently? They range from 1) data integration, building on the recent splurge of global databases and products to create better integration of soil biodiversity monitoring across the globe, over 2) the mechanistic understanding of soil biodiversity (causal inference) to 3) the creation of more accurate scenarios of soil biodiversity in an uncertain future and 4) the increased understanding of other aspects of biodiversity (traits, genetic diversity, hidden diversity)…

They include 5) the need for better global data on drivers of soil biodiversity (from microclimate to heavy metals in the soil) and 6) the call for increased global collaboration and exchange of knowledge, e.g. surrounding the precious and rare taxonomic knowledge of many obscure soil species groups.

Finally, they highlighted 7) the need for the application of our increasing knowledge in conservation and 8) improved communication of our knowledge – and needs – to public and policy to get to that final and most critical step: actually protecting that soil biodiversity before it is lost.

These eight frontiers will need to be overcome in the near future to ensure the conservation of soils for the next generations. Critical, as with the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1937):‘The nation that destroys its soil, destroys itself’.

Soils have unfortunately long been neglected and only now our understanding of – and enthusiasm for – them is making a comeback. Indeed, the significance of soils has now moved more and more into the scientific focus, finally changing from a niche topic with many specialized journals and conferences to a mainstream topic in ecology, earth‐system sciences, and nature conservation over the last two decades.

Let’s keep it there, where it belongs!

The Swiss mountains, home to a fabulous diversity of landscapes and soils

Posted in Switzerland | Tagged Ecology, Mountains, Science, WBF | Leave a comment

Are non-native plants adapting to city life?

Posted on October 24, 2022 by lembrechtsjonas

With chapter 4 now published, the now finished PhD of Charly Géron has created quite the storyline on how non-native plants are invading our urban environments!

In his first paper, we found out that alien plant species in European cities originated from warmer and drier native ranges, as they are often much better at ease in the warm and often drier climates in our cities than many native plants. The urban heat island in action!

*Pauwlonia tomentosa,* one of our studied tree species, at ease on a rooftop

In the second ‘Géron et al.’, we dove deeper into the performance of alien plants in the city, with the help of 6 species from the Asteraceae family, one of the families of plant species with the most global invaders. A hitherto unresolved question was how stressful the urban environments become during climate extremes such as heatwaves and droughts. Do such episodes still favor alien plant species, or set them back? The results were a tad surprising: all studied species, regardless of their climate of origin and thus their love for heat or cold, showed fewer signs of stress during a heatwave when shaded (by nature or concrete alike).

Interestingly, this positive effect of shading was found again when focussing on woody invaders, again both for species from warmer ánd from cooler origins. Interestingly, however, we did see a clear contrast in WHERE along the urban-rural gradient species were growing: those from warmer origins preferred the city, those from cooler origins the countryside. Yet despite this clear segregation, all of them were remarkably less stressed when trees or buildings provided them with shade during one of Western Europe’s recent hot and dry summers!

So now, there is Géron et al. number 4, and it takes us even deeper into the story. We wondered if the strong variation in environmental conditions along the urban-rural gradient (hot/dry vs. cool/moist) would result in natural selection within a species: would populations from urban environments perform better in warm and dry conditions than their nephews from the same species yet coming from cool environments? Pineapple* weed (Matricaria discoidea), a tiny Asteraceae plant, came to the rescue.

Pineapple weed in its favorite environment: cracks! (c) Charly Géron

We harvested seeds from several populations from urban and rural environments across Belgium, and put them in growth chambers with either urban or rural climate and/or soils. With a smart experimental design (‘a simulated reciprocal common garden experiment’, in scientific terms), we could disentangle performance differences between the different populations and, very important, if these were due to plasticity, natural selection, or an influence of the mother plant.

Racks of tiny test tubes with seeds of pineapple weed – ready to be subjected to urban climate conditions in the growth chamber. Working with small plants is definitely convenient from the space-perspective! (c) Charly Géron

So, what did we find here? First of all: things are pretty complicated in the realm of population genetics, as tons of things interact with each other. Secondly: most of the observed variation in the growth chamber was related to the conditions of the mother plant (working through e.g. seed size), while our little pineappleweeds from the same populations also showed substantial plasticity when subjected to different environments. The ‘holy grail’ we were looking for – local adaptation, populations changing genetically as a result of the urban environment – could however not be found.

And thus: are non-native species adapting to a city life? No clear genetic adaptation could be observed in our case, at least nothing that resulted in a different performance. But that’s just our little stone on the pile of science – others might find other things in other environments, as so often in ecology.

The 4 papers in a row:

Géron et al. 2021a. Biological invasions

Géron et al. 2021b. Ecology and Evolution

Géron et al. 2022a. Urban forestry & urban greening

Géron et al. 20202b. Plant ecology

*Pineapple weed does smell quite nicely like pineapple!

Posted in Belgium | Tagged Biological invasions, Cities, Invasive species, Nature, PhD, Plant invasions, Urban ecology | Leave a comment

Scicomm award

Posted on October 21, 2022 by lembrechtsjonas

We won!

The CurieuzeNeuzen team is one of the winners of the Annual Science Communication Prize of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium! The prize is awarded to researchers who are committed to creative and accessible science communication.

CurieuzeNeuzen in de Tuin was praised by the jury for the ‘clever communication campaign and innovative Internet-of-Things technology’, with which we reach a large audience, and thus ‘widely raise awareness about an important climate theme: heat and drought’.

This would of course not have been possible without our partners and enthusiastic participants: so this price is definitely for all of you!

Nice extra: we are still in the running to take home the EOS audience award: you can vote via eoswetenschap.eu.

Posted in Belgium | Tagged CNidT, Heat, Microclimate, Scicomm, Urban, wetenschapscommunicatie | 1 Comment

The end

Posted on October 3, 2022 by lembrechtsjonas

The end has arrived: this weekend, the 3000 participants of our large-scale citizen science project sent back their ‘garden dagger’ to us, closing the lid on the data collection for the most ambitious thing I have ever undertaken.

Starting of with 50.000 enthusiastic citizens, selecting a representative set of 4400 of them, augmented with a few hundreds of agricultural fields and nature reserves, we set off on a wild measuring rollercoaster in the spring of 2021. After an extremely wet year that made us wade through an unprecedented wealth of data on how garden soils buffer extreme precipitation events, 3000 of our original citizens were found willing to join us again in 2022 for part 2. A little bit less rain, we hoped this time around, for the sake of science…

We were not disappointed, although our gardens and groundwater reserves definitely were.

We could track average soil moisture in Flemish gardens throughout the dry season of 2022, and compare it with the extremely wet summer of 2021.

Yet, even such an exciting project like this one has an end. We have (more than!) enough data to now dive deep into the science. Unexpectedly interesting data as well, with two extremely contrasting summer seasons, and some interesting cold spells in spring.

What’s funny: normally, I would tell you to now ‘stay tuned for the results’! Yet what makes this project especially exciting is that results rolled in every day, and we had plenty of opportunities to keep the participants – and the general public – on what was happening across Flanders’ gardens. Just scroll through the list of articles on De Standaard newspaper website to see (in Dutch) the many interesting insights we got to communicate so far!

August 2022, Flemish lawns have turned brown after one of the most intensely dry summers since measurements started. A sharp contrast with the wettest summer ever the year before!

Much more to come, of course, so I’ll say it anyway: stay tuned for more cool results!

So, what’s next? My main wish is that this creates a spark, a movement. We want scientists and society to join forces and start monitoring the environment together, as we did here and as is done in other large-scale community science projects (iNaturalist or eBird, to name two). We want more microclimate networks like this, to get a better view of the very local variation in weather conditions there where it matters for plants.

The good news is: that spark is clearly there. We have MANY talks ongoing with people who want to build on what we have here. So again: stay tuned for more!!!

Posted in Belgium | 1 Comment

To the roots

Posted on September 8, 2022 by lembrechtsjonas

Can one go on a three-day sabbatical? Cause I just gave myself a three-day sabbatical.

Autumn along the mountain trails in the northern Scandes, the perfect atmosphere for creative thinking

I travelled to the northern Scandes on a short trip back to the roots of my research, where it all began in 2012 and where still so much of my favourite science is happening.

I went there to think about how to shape future research plans. I went there to let the plants and the mountains talk to me, let them show me what important questions need to be answered. I went there to puzzle all pieces together of what we learned over 10 years of research up north, on the fingerprints of climate and land use change on our precious tundra vegetation.

Salix herbacea on a rocky cliff. While nature looks stable and unmovable as rocks in the area, change is there for those who see its subtle fingerprints. How long has this little willow been here? And how long can it stay?

I went there for long conversations with Keith, my closest local collaborator, while walking through the autumn landscape, surveying plots and observing changes.

The main goal of all this is trying to wrap my head around 120 years of vegetation change in the region. We have a unique situation up there, with a series of old vegetation, soil and landscape surveys ranging all the way back to 1903, plus an increasingly clear understanding of the dynamics in climate change (the local weather station has measured continuously since the 1910s) and land use change (dynamics in Saami people reindeer herding, railroad building for mining and the ups and downs of tourism over the century.

Such ideas and revelations don’t come to you that easily over yet another Zoom-meeting. Just like Alexander Von Humboldt so many years before us, you have to observe the system while you’re in it to dig the deepest. The more you get to know an ecosystem, the more questions pop up. And so I realized, when standing on a cliff where Thore Fries must have been standing all the way back in 1917: thanks to these historic datasets, we know there was no forest there, as its upper boundary was a mindboggling 200 (elevational!) m or so lower on the hill. Thanks to him, we know what plants were growing there a century ago, and when and how they were flowering.

There was no forest so high up the slope, when Thore Fries was standing there and doing his pioneering vegetation survey in 1917. There was no forest there in the 1950s either? Was it climate change that allowed this rapid upward expansion, or are there other factors at work?

The question will be: can we get to the root cause of what is driving these changes? Can we disentangle the complex interactions that are at play over time in such an ecosystem, making it into what it is now? And can that help us looking forward, to a future in which the Arctic is experiencing ever more unexpected extreme events?

Another caterpillar outbreak has been devastating to the birch trees this year, but even the crowberry (Empetrum nigrum) has now turned brown. Is there a sudden change to the system imminent?

That is something I want to find out over the coming years, as I believe that area, with its unprecedented old datasets, can be a blueprint of what is happening in all these places where we humans perhaps looked less carefully.