The 3D lab

Ready for 2020

Posted on December 29, 2019 by lembrechtsjonas

The 3D lab is ready for the new year to come, and plans are bigger than ever! Let’s take the opportunity of those dark days before January to highlight some of the things we hope to bring to you:

First and foremost: our PhD-students are preparing to harvest the benefits from their hard work in the previous year(s). A PhD always starts with searching, learning, building a foundation to work upon. Reading literature, doing fieldwork and learning and doing statistical analysis, it all requires a big investment. For Ronja, Charly and Jan, these things are now going to pay off. They are all currently working on (analyses for) their first first-author papers and, oh boy, does that make me proud!

What is happening in these mountain soils? Our team is hoping to tell you more about it in 2020!

2019 has given us a whole bunch of big announcements regarding our SoilTemp-database. Now I promise, 2020 is when we will finally do what we set out to do: consolidating the global network, spreading its branches further to all parts of the globe, and answering these big global microclimate questions that have been intriguing scientists for so long. We have the plans of freshly started PhD-student Stef with our colleagues in Leuven, and of our collaborations with geomorphometrists (scientists studying the shape of the land), and the machine learning team in Zürich. But most of all, we will benefit from the group effort of several hundred of microclimate enthusiasts to do what scientists do best: work together to tackle global problems.

How do forest understory temperatures differ from the weather station averages? One of the countless SoilTemp-questions for the new year.

Our work with the Mountain Invasion Research Network will also bring more good news in the new year. We do not only have the work of Ronja and Jan, and of master students Ilias, Sam, Robin and Nell, but will also work together more with PhD-student Eduardo and the rest of the South American MIREN-team. Then there is more global analyses on the way, for example regarding the mysteries of the belowground world along mountain roads and trails.

Afbeeldingsresultaat voor the3dlab eduardo

The Chilean part of our MIREN-team, one of the many exciting collaborations planned in the new year!

Finally, there is our work in the urban realm. Charly is promising some fantastic discoveries on urban invasions in the new year; we teamed up with a global network on urban invasions, and master student Naomi is joining the Lab to answer questions on the perception of nature in the city. Last but not least, there is some big funding news in the making for our urban projects. What that’s going to be about will have to remain a secret till early next year.

Where are non-native plant species sprouting most? Charly will be able to tell you in the near future!

So, that are our major story lines in the new year. We hope to keep The 3D Lab growing, keep learning from each other, keep doin great science and, most importantly of all, solve important scientific questions that will help us to keep our eyes on the price: saving our natural world from the dramatic changes our world is experiencing.

Posted in General, Science | Tagged Cities, climate change, Global change, Mountains, Nature, Nature photography, Science, Students, Teamwork | Leave a comment

Strengthening SoilTemp

Posted on December 23, 2019 by lembrechtsjonas

Our SoilTemp-network got pretty lucky the week for Christmas: the project we applied for with the Research Foundation Flanders got funded, ensuring that our database iniative can gear up even more!

Although it was a relatively small grant that covers research equipment only, it comes in addition to earlier realized travel money and just at the right time to further consolidate our growing network.

The new funds allows us to expand our research in 3 critical directions. First of all, we’ll reinforce the established logger network we have in the north of Scandinavia. There, in the beautiful Scandes mountain range in Norway and Sweden and the flatlands of northern Finland, a whole range of SoilTemp-collaborators have been maintaining soil temperature loggers for years.

Expanding our SoilTemp logger network in the northern Scandes will help us understand the effect of the complex topography in the region

Thanks to these longterm achievements, the area already forms the biggest stronghold of our network, yet expanding it even more with the newly received loggers will ensure that we can use the northern Scandes to answer the most detailed and high-resolution microclimate questions.

What is more, we can now finally realize a longstanding dream: we can fly a drone over our precious mountains to look at them from above. This will provide crucial high-resolution data on the impact of mountain disturbances – like trails – on the mountain vegetation and its microclimate.

Flying a drone with thermal camera, here at a workshop in France

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we will make sure SoilTemp will conquer the world even more: we will install microclimate loggers in some of the most remote places of the world to fill the emptiest spots on our worldmap. For those interested in helping us with the latter achievement, keep an eye out for a formal call early in the new year!

SoilTemp wants to get a foothold in more of the most remote places on earth. Here, the Andes in southern Chile

Posted in General, Science | Tagged climate change, Ecology, Global change, Microclimate, Mountains, Nature, Science, SoilTemp, Travel | Leave a comment

Dad in academia

Posted on December 19, 2019 by lembrechtsjonas

On September 5th, my wife gave birth to a beautiful girl. On that day, our lifes went into a new, happier, fuller and much muore complicated phase: that of parenthood.

Me and the little thing that turned my life upside down

From one day to the next, I became a ‘dad in academia’. And from that day, the search was one: how to balance the sometimes more-than-full-time job that is being a postdoctoral researcher with the more-than-full-time job of being a loving dad. But there I am lucky, as my job as a postdoc – and my colleagues – allow me that one wonderful thing: flexibility.

Thanks to this, I could shift around my working hours, keeping in mind what the baby wanted, needed and deserved. That is a privilege, it truly is, but also one of the greatest things about a job in academia: most of the time it doesn’t matter too much when and where you work, as long as the work gets done.

So I dove into the data to see how that looks, the working life of a dad in academia.

My work schedule (minutiously tracked using the Timeular app) from September 5th, Zoyla’s birthday, till today, with each day a column. Pink colors indicate work that I did during working hours (of a ‘normal’ 9 to 5). The blue boxes are for work done outside these hours. Grey zones represent the weekends, horizontal black lines delineate the lunch break (often with colleagues). Graph made with ggplot and (due to time limitations, I’m a working dad after all) some cheating in Inkscape.

It looks like I did get the job done. Even though the first two weeks of her little life where spend in the hospital (she had to recover from a bacterial infection), the last two weeks were mostly spend moving into our own house, and I invested a great deal of time lowering the workload of the mother, I did still manage to be a fulltime scientist.

Explaining the magic of R to the baby. She prefers ArcGIS, it’s more colorfull.

It required quite some creativity, ranging from explaining the magic of R to a – relatively – interested 3-months-old to working standing straight with a sleeping baby in a sling. There was catching up of lost working hours in the evenings and the weekends, and profiting maximally from the early rising. There were moments of processing emails when nothing else could be done, like the boring times in the hospital when baby was kept in a different room, or in the darkest moments of the nights when the baby really really didn’t want to be in her bed.

Got the baby to sleep, so room for late night paper submission

In return, I got to experience so many precious moments of that baby growing up. Help ensuring that her mother doesn’t have to take the burden all alone, and being there with so many of the ‘firsts’ that make a parent happy.

Thanks to this academic flexibility, I never felt things getting out of control. Now, the new balance of life as a dad in academia has been found. What does remain challenging? The international travel that inevitably comes with my job. Leaving mum and baby alone for more than a day will every time tear me apart. For my next conference in Iceland, we’ll at least all go together, but many more heartbraking goodbyes will come.

Picture by Carina Kaba photography

Posted in Belgium, General | Tagged Baby, Father, Life, Parenthood, work | 2 Comments

Microclimatic conditions anywhere at any time!

Posted on December 10, 2019 by lembrechtsjonas

Earlier this month, the journal Global Change Biology asked me to write a little commentary about a recent paper . Well, that’s an offer one cannot refuse! First of all: that’s a tremendous honour; thanks GCB to think of me to write such a commentary. Secondly: the paper, from one of our SoilTemp-colleagues Ilya Maclean, is a beauty and more than worth the extra press.

So I got Jonathan Lenoir on board and wrote ‘Microclimatic conditions anywhere at any time!’

How we can get microclimatic conditions anywhere at any time, using the mechanistic models from Maclean (2019) in Global Change Biology, and microclimate measurements (for example from our SoilTemp-network)

That is indeed exactly what we are celebrating here with this commentary: thanks to the computer models made by Maclean and colleagues, we can now finally – finally! – calculate microclimatic conditions anywhere in the world, and for any moment in the past, present ànd future. And that is important, as it is these local climate conditions – overlooked by traditional weather stations – that do matter for all biodiversity on earth.

Microclimate logger

So now, what is next in global change ecology research, given that we can now get the ‘real’ climatic conditions anywhere at any time? Well, we argue that the predictions should be matched with on-the-ground measurements from all over the world.

And that’s where our SoilTemp-database steps in. We would herewith like to renew our call to all researchers having microclimatic data records for a given location and microhabitat to share their data in a common and global geo-database: SoilTemp. More about that on soiltemp.weebly.com!

Reference

Lembrechts JJ, Lenoir J (2019). Microclimatic conditions anywhere at any time! Global Change Biology.

Posted in General, Science | Tagged Climate, climate change, Ecology, Global change, Microclimate, Mountain photography, Mountains, Nature, Outdoors, Science | Leave a comment

The hiking trail invasions

Posted on December 5, 2019 by lembrechtsjonas

We like mountain trails. But we are not alone, it looks like: invasive plant species love them as well as a gateway to invade higher elevations areas.

What we always suspected, is now finally proven, thanks to the work of a tireless master student, spending a summer hiking up and down the slopes of the Chilean Andes.

Click on the interactive image below to learn more about our results:

Thanks to Rebecca Liedtke and Jonas Lembrechts for pictures

Posted in Chile, General, Science | Tagged Andes, Ecology, Global change, Hiking, Invasive species, Landscape photography, Mountains, Nature, Plants, Science, Travel, Traveling | Leave a comment

Fluorescence

Posted on November 27, 2019 by lembrechtsjonas

For years, I have been teaching a practical course on the measurement of plant stress to our master students. In that course, we introduce them to the magical ecological process called ‘fluorescence’ to investigate stress in their studied plant species. Now, finally, the ultimate field guide on how to measure this fluorescence is out, thanks to our ambitious ‘ClimEx’-handbook paper (see this earlier post).

Chlorophyll fluorescence sensor

Yes, I am really talking about fluorescence, the physical process in which objects emit light, even when the light source is already gone. No, this does not result in leaves glooming like eyes of a cat in the dark, unfortunately. Leaves send out light at a wavelength invisible for the eye: infrared.

Clips for fluorescence measurement

In the practical course, students find out that the fluorescence of a leaf is the result of an excess of light in the plant: more that they can use for photosynthesis. It serves hence as an indirect way of measuring how much light energy the plants can use, which is then a measure for their ‘happiness’ level, as I tell the students.

With an ingenuous sequence of light pulses to activate and deactivate the photosynthesis apparatus of the leave, we can find out how much a plant is suffering.

This years of teaching to the students now culminated in a whole chapter on ‘Chlorophyll fluorescence’ in the recent Handbook on Climate Change Experiments. It is a complicated procedure, but there is tens of thousands of scientific papers talking about it. Now, we provide the easy gateway into the complex science behind the fluorescence. From now on, the magic of fluorescence will have no mysteries anymore to both students and scientists using the technique and, hopefully, the results of the next tens of thousands of papers should be much more comparable.