The 3D lab

News from the field

Posted on July 23, 2022 by lembrechtsjonas

It has been a roller coaster ride to get the whole team in northern Scandinavia, as you can read here, but now the fieldwork is on a roll!

That things are going well is testified by the pictures I am receiving back at home from the great fieldwork and breathtaking views I’m missing out from.

Thanks to the enthusiasm and efficiency (and also sheer size, with one PhD, 5 master students, a bachelor student and a part-time field assitant!) of the team, the work is progressing much faster than initially feared. That is a good thing, as this way we might catch up with the close to a week of delay we accumulated at the start, thanks to our flight and transportation issues.

For me at home, it is simply a blessing to see the Excel sheets filling up day by day with important data on the distribution of so many important plant species along our Norwegian mountain roads. The database of the Mountain Invasion Research Network will get a fabulous present with what we are finding here!

All pictures here courtesy of Violetta Chernoray

Posted in Norway | Tagged Ecology, Global change, Hiking, Landscape photography, Mountain photography, Mountains, Nature, Outdoors, Plants, Scandinavia, Science | Leave a comment

Epic

Posted on July 15, 2022 by lembrechtsjonas

What an epic week was this! The mountain part of The 3D Lab wanted to get to northern Sweden for an important summer of fieldwork, but the world was against it…

The team on its first mountain hike. An amazing group of young scientists which I’m honoured to show the beauty of northern Sweden

A massive strike at Scandinavian Airlines (they seem to be in big, big trouble, but that’s a whole other story) resulted in the consistent cancellation of ALL flights to Kiruna, for now already over two weeks in a row. So we had to come up with creative ways to get the 7 team members up there. After a week of delay, a two-day drive from Stockholm all the way up to the north of Sweden, and a well-timed pick up of a few team members at the nearest airport, we ended up making it. The live updates from that epic trip can be found on my Twitter feed!

Overnight stay halfway Sweden, in Umeå, enjoying the midnight twilight

But a bit of travel chaos was not going to stop us, as we were on an important mission: the tenth anniversary survey of my own master thesis project: the long-term monitoring of plant species distributions along Norwegian mountain roads!

Monitoring plant communities along Norwegian mountain roads

Every five years, the vegetation along these mountain roads gets resurveyed, to keep a close eye on how human disturbances and climate change together reshuffle plant species distributions. The master students will all look at a different aspect of that story, ranging from the potential upward expansion of non-native species, over the impact of microclimate to the interaction of plants with the local bumblebees.

Now, I went for delegating: I left them – with a bit of heartache – to their work and travelled back home. But I trust they will do a great job up there, under the experienced leadership of long-time lab member Jan (it’s the 5th year anniversary of HIS thesis on the transect).

Already a trip of epic proportions, and likely one the team members won’t ever forget. Don’t we just look like the fellowship of the ring?

And obviously I’ll keep fulfilling my favourite role as ‘human plant ID-app’, identifying species over WhatsApp whenever they’re in doubt.

Two of our trusty research tools together: a microclimate sensor (mushroom on the right) and a pin-point frame for vegetation monitoring

Posted in Norway, Sweden | Tagged Ecology, Fieldwork, Global change, Hiking, Mountains, Nature, Outdoors, Scandinavia, Science | 1 Comment

Final rehearsal

Posted on July 9, 2022 by lembrechtsjonas

Yesterday, we took (part of) our team to the ‘Kalmthoutse Heide’, one of Flanders’ most impressive heathland areas.

The goal? Prepare for the upcoming fieldwork season in northern Scandinavia, where soon a team of 6 from our lab will go to resurvey our long-term plant community plots up there (and do a lot of other awesome stuff).

The students doing a ‘mock-transect’, following all the steps and processes we will take in the field, including plant identification

Such a preparatory day gives us the perfect opportunity to get familiar with the different monitoring techniques, the nature of the work and the time it will take. This way, we save a good day of trial-and-error when we actually arrive in Scandinavia, next week.

Additionally, we get a first glimpse of many of the plant species we will encounter in northern Scandinavia. It is actually rather shocking how much overlap there is in species between our Flemish heathlands and at least the lowlands of the northern Scandes. Ruderal lowland species like Trifolium (clover), Taraxacum (dandelion), Cirsium (thistle) and Poa (grasses), but also many of the more typical species of the area, such as Deschampsia flexuosa and several of the dominant tree species: Betula pubescens (birch), Pinus sylvestris (pine) and Sorbus (mountain-ash).

This gives the students – many of whom have so far very little experience with plant identification – a good plant species base when arriving in Abisko.

And, of course, it allows us to work together as a team for the first time, and me to get to know the new students a bit!

Posted in Belgium | Tagged Botany, Ecology, Fieldwork, Heathland, Hiking, Kalmthout, Landscape photography, Nature, Outdoors, Plants, Science | Leave a comment

An injection of mountain views

Posted on July 7, 2022 by lembrechtsjonas

I got to spend a bit under a week in the city of Davos, in the Swiss Alps, last week (more on the what and why here!). With such a backdrop for a conference, we decided that an early morning trip into the depths of the Alps would be a good way to prepare for more scientific discussions.

View from the Flüelapass – close to Davos

And did that not disappoint! The Alps are truly stunning in early summer, with their fields of flowers, stunning views and picturesque villages.

I quickly realized that I hadn’t seen enough mountains recently. As my research has increasingly been moving into the computer and out of the field, it was getting increasingly rare that I saw the mountains with my own eyes.

So this post is here just to shamelessly plug in some mountain views.

Posted in Switzerland | Tagged Davos, Ecology, Hiking, Mountains, Nature, Science | 2 Comments

Beyond the trailside

Posted on July 4, 2022 by lembrechtsjonas

It is a question not too often asked: what is the impact of hiking trails on the vegetation they cross? In a series of observational studies in mountain regions across the globe with the Mountain Invasion Research Network, we are trying to tease these impacts apart.

Part of the MIREN team in Mendoza surveying the dry steppe vegetation

In a recent study, led by the MIREN team from Mendoza, we show what these trails do with the surrounding vegetation in the dry Argentinean Andes. As so often, we found a positive effect of trails on non-native species presence, although surprisingly little impact on richness and cover was found. In contrast, the presence of livestock – assessed simply by counting their dung – had a positive effect on non-native presence, richness, ánd cover.

Lead author Lisi monitoring vegetation on a breathtaking mountain backdrop

Additionally, the typical decline of non-native species with elevation was observed: the higher one goes into the mountains, the fewer non-natives are found. Nevertheless, even the highest elevations were not entirely free of non-native species, with the omnipresent Cerastium arvense and Taraxacum officinale occurring all the way up to 3500 m a.s.l.

The native vegetation of the dry Argentinian Andes includes this fabulous ‘mandala-shaped’ Viola species

The conclusion here is rather worrying: the dry Andes vegetation – with its patches of bare soil under protective shrub canopies that facilitate establishment – are relatively vulnerable for non-native plant species expansion away from the trail into the natural vegetation. This effect is strengthened by the intensive use of the landscape by livestock, which rarely sticks to the trail and might spread non-natives even more rapidly away from the trails. With the more than 40 non-native plant species identified in the system, it is clear that the effect of trails here reaches significantly further into the mountain vegetation than the mere imprint of footsteps.

Touristic activities such as horseback riding can mean a significant boost for the spread of non-native plant species in the region

Reference: Alvarez, M. A., Barros, A. A., Vázquez, D. P., Bonjour, L. D. J., Lembrechts, J. J., Wedegärtner, R. E., & Aschero, V. (2022). Hiking and livestock favor non-native plants in the high Andes. Biological Invasions, 1-14.

Posted in Argentina | Tagged Andes, Global change, Hiking, Mountains, Nature, Nature photography, Plant invasions, Plants, Travel, Vegetation | Leave a comment

To save our world’s biodiversity

Posted on June 19, 2022 by lembrechtsjonas

Today I will be presenting our SoilTemp project at the World Biodiversity Forum in Davos, Switzerland. That place might ring a bell from many a global convention, and the conference name even sounds familiar to the World Economic Forum hosted here. In fact, we are here with a same ambitious goal: bringing together some of the worlds’ experts on biodiversity towards a globally coordinated effort to save as much of it as we can.

View of Davos and – for those who know where to look – its conference center

High ambitions, for sure, but high stakes as well.

An important line of thought throughout the conference, however, is that there is surprisingly much about the sheer numbers of biodiversity that we simply don’t know yet. Especially in remote areas like mountains, and for more ‘obscure’ organisms like soil micro-organisms, we simply do not know yet what is out there, let alone how much of it we are loosing as a result of global change.

Rampion flower in a trailside in the Swiss Alps close to Davos, proudly reminding us what a wonderful biodiversity we can find in this world.

The good news is that this issue is more and more being voiced, and global efforts to monitor, map and predict global biodiversity are increasingly popping up. Many great examples of those were presented here this week.

Tomorrow, I will be showing how I think our work with SoilTemp can help in that regard: we are working hard to provide the necessary climatic baseline data to aid that mapping and predicting. Indeed, without good, accurate and most importantly relevant climate data – and all of that is also still rather patchy across the globe – it is even harder to get an idea of the fate of our worlds’ biodiversity.