The 3D lab

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.

For those in Davos, very much welcome to my talk at 16h15!

Campanula flower stubbornly holding on to the rocks of a road tunnel. Anthropogenic pressures are seriously threatening biodiversity, but there is still an awful lot to fight for!

Posted in Switzerland | Tagged Biodiversity, climate change, Global change, Hiking, Mountains, Nature, Outdoors, Plants, WBF2022 | Leave a comment

Trampling to save mountain plant diversity?

Posted on June 13, 2022 by lembrechtsjonas

By Ronja Wedegärtner and Jonas Lembrechts

What do you think about when you follow a hiking path up to the nearest mountain peak? When not thinking about the next chocolate break or the view, I spend my time thinking about ways that the trail that I am walking along might change the vegetation.

As I walk up I am passing through different vegetation types. First, the last meters of mountain forest before entering a zone of willow shrubs, followed by a mosaic of low dwarf shrub tundra and alpine meadows. Up on the peak, the vegetation is sparse and close to the ground.

The fact that trail hiking locally affects mountain vegetation is rather obvious. How exactly the vegetation reacts to this persistent trampling, that has up till now however been surprisingly unknown.

Climate is considered the most important driver of where species grow at broader scales. How could those distribution patterns be changed by trails? Well, seeds can stick to boots and clothes and trampling on and along the trail can create gaps in the vegetation that might allow seeds to grow and establish. Alpine plants are considered especially vulnerable to new neighbor plants that might be moved in by hikers from the vegetation at lower zones. On the other hand, alpine species CAN grow in lower elevation zones – just think about those alpine plants thriving in lowland rock gardens. The climate is suitable for them, but the neighboring lowland plants are most often what hampers their lowland success: When they have to compete with faster growing lowland plants for light and nutrients, alpine species are usually outcompeted. When we remove those neighbors along trails by trampling on them, this could potentially improve alpine species chances in such locations?

With this in mind we surveyed almost 200 transects along 16 hiking trails in two popular hiking areas (Dovrefjell in Norway and Abisko, Sweden) and compared which species we found in trailsides and which in the vegetation away from trails. We identified all plant species and measured how disturbed the plots were.

We surveyed the vegetation along 16 hiking trails in the Scandinavian mountains of Abisko (Sweden) and Dovrefjell (Norway) to pinpoint the effects of hiking trails on the unique vegetation of those systems. The study is now published in the journal *Diversity and Distributions.*

Interestingly, we found a median of 4 plant species more in trailside plots than in those away from the trails, an average increase in diversity of 24%.

A simple figure but with important implications: trails have a higher plant species richness than the adjacent interior vegetation. A positive effect of disturbance on vegetation, perhaps a bit counter-intuitive to most?

Based on our more than 11000 species observations and a unique high-resolution climate data, we examined in which climate we found species along trails and away from them (their realized climatic niches) and checked if these niches had shifted along the trails.

*Lead author Ronja immersed in dense willow shrubs along a mountain trail. Picture: I. Janssens.*

We found that alpine species’ distributions shifted towards warmer locations along trails and that more species’ niches overlapped in trailsides – creating greater richness. As such, trails seemed to create interesting opportunities for range expansion for a variety of species.

Importantly, trampling can create space for alpine plants and may help them persist in a changing climate. But we need to consider trails in context: disturbances may also destroy rare communities or rare and trampling-sensitive species.

So, think where you walk when you are next hiking in the mountains and maybe have a little look around for yourself – do you see more or different species along the trail than away from it?

Reference:

Wedegärtner, R. E., Lembrechts, J. J., van der Wal, R., Barros, A., Chauvin, A., Janssens, I., & Graae, B. J. (2022). Hiking trails shift plant species’ realized climatic niches and locally increase species richness. Diversity and Distributions. https://doi.org/10.1111/ddi.13552