The 3D lab

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.

Posted in General, Science | Tagged climate change, Ecology, Fieldwork, Global change, Nature, PhD, Plants, Science | Leave a comment

Welcoming Eduardo

Posted on November 17, 2019 by lembrechtsjonas

Ecology is a global science, and one that can only be done together. Understanding our world’s nature indeed needs collaborations between ecologists from all over the world, each from their own environment and perspective.

The Belgian team (Jonas and Jan on the left), visiting the Chilean team (Eduardo and Aníbal, on the right) in January

That is exactly why we are very happy to have Eduardo visiting our Antwerp lab for 3 months. Eduardo is a PhD-student from Concepcíon, Chile, and closely working with us within the Mountain Invasion Research Network.

The fabulous landscape – with volcano in the background – where Eduardo studies the effect of mountain roads on invasive plant species

After we visited them in Chile, collecting data for our global project on mycorrhizal fungi in mountain roads, Eduardo is now returning the favour with a visit to Antwerp. Less pretty landscapes here, yet we hope to make up for that with fun science!

Plan is to work on papers together on the invasion of alien plant species along mountain roads, a topic close to all of our hearts.

Stay tuned for more!

Posted in Chile, General | Tagged Andes, Ecology, Mountain ecology, Mountain photography, Mountains, Nature, Photography, Science, Travel | Leave a comment

The much-needed handbook

Posted on November 7, 2019 by lembrechtsjonas

Let me tell you a little story. Imagine that you are an ambitious young PhD-student, worried about climate change and dedicated to spend the next 4 years performing an experiment that will answer critical questions on the future of our planet.

Climate change experiments, so crucial to understand the future of our rapidly changing world. Yet how to do them well?

You prepare your project thorougly, sitting together with your supervisors to decide which techniques to use, and browsing the literature for inspiration. You make important decisions that fit your specific case perfectly, setting up a unique and well-designed experiment that will answer your critical research question once and for all.

And then, results come in. And they are inconclusive. As in, climate change will have major implications for your study system, but results just don’t match up with what other people find. Bummer. Not only for you, when you try putting your results in perspective. Also for the whole scientific community, when trying to unify, summarize and synthesize results. But most importantly so for our whole society: how to communicate clearly about the impacts of climate change for the functioning of our planet if studies do not seem to hopelessly disagree with each other?

Measuring photosynthesis using a LI-COR

But then you dig deeper into the literature. Turns out that experiment B had a different tactic of measuring leaf traits, while experiment C worked with an entirely different definition of what exactly ‘plant stress’ entails. Research group D on the other hand has a different measurement tool alltogether, explaining their different results. Finally, the results of experiment E turned out only to be valid for rainforests, and not for the Arctic tundra where you did your precious experiment.

Did you measure leaf litter fall the same way as the other researchers in your field?

What is lacking, clearly, is uniformity. Individual research projects invest considerable resources in collecting data for a number of environmental and biotic variables and in developing protocols for field measurements. This leads to a diversity of similar but not quite identical protocols, and hence to a diversity of ways to measure and quantify the same underlying effects and responses. While some of this variability may be due to good scientific reasons, protocol selection is often based on traditions and habits.

Climate change experiments need to strive for uniformity, to make results comparable and easier to interpret between studies.

And this issue, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly what we solved! With 115 experts in the field, we created a handbook for climate change experiments (found here) that brings best practices together. Incomparability should now forever be in the past, where it belongs.

Reference

Halbritter et al. (2019) The handbook for standardised field and laboratory measurements in terrestrial climate-change experiments and observational studies (ClimEx). Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

Posted in General, Science | Tagged climate change, Ecology, Fieldwork, Global change, Nature, Science | Leave a comment

Death is life

Posted on November 3, 2019 by lembrechtsjonas

Halloween has passed, with rain and wind and falling autumn leaves. And all over the forest: the very spooky ‘consumers of the death’, the creatures of the dark soils feasting on what has fallen: the saprotrophs and detritivores. What better time is there to put them in the spotlight, than All Hallow’s Eve.

A mushroom sprouting from a rotten log in a Danish forest. In autumn, the death burst of life

When visiting Aarhus in Denmark last week, I had a little walk through a seaside forest, where this spooky destruction was in full swing. The forest floor was covered with piles of dead leaves, logs, and branches, and the variety of organisms feasting on them was astonishing.

Autumn on the Danish seaside

Yet what we get to see on the outside – mostly cute little mushroom heads- isonly the tip of a dark and soily iceberg. The soil microbial community hosts countless organisms underneath the surface, many of them never see the light. There is the mycelia of the fungi, there is wiggly worms of all sorts and kinds, there is beetles, bacteria, springtails and such. When a leaf has fallen, it journey has only just begun…

With modern techniques and global collaborations, scientists are diving deeper into this dark and secret world than ever before. Yet every new discovery reveals how much there is still to learn. For example, a recent long-awaited paper in Science finally describes the global distribution of earthworm diversity (showing that their diversity is highest at higher lattitudes).

When a leaf falls, its journey has only just begun…

Earthworms, you might say, are they much of a secret? They live right under our very own eyes in the soil of our gardens! True, yet there is so little we knew about their global distributions, and which species of them are occurring where. An earthworm is not just an earthworm, mind you!

Yet there they are again: the fruits of increasing global collaboration! Now we do have a map of global earthworm diversity, as we do for nematodes (even tinier worms) and mycorrhizae (fungi living in roots of plants). But those are the easy ones to tackle, what about all this diversity that hardly anybody has ever even heard off?

The road is long, yet the blackbox that our soils are is slowly, day by day, loosing parts of its spooky unfamiliarity. In return, we get an even more spooky sense of wonder: what a mysterious bunch of creatures and ecologies we find belowground, and how intricately are their communities woven together!