The 3D lab

2018 in stories (1)

Posted on December 25, 2018 by lembrechtsjonas

Here on ‘On top of the world’, we have the tradition to end the year with a ‘best of’, a list of the most read stories on this blog from the last year. This list helps us to wrap up everything that happened here in the last 12 months. And that is a lot of big things, as you will see.

12 months ago, our situation was indeed very different from where we are standing now. At the beginning of the year, I was still full-on working on the defence of my PhD, yet since then, this website – and I – have rapidly evolved. Now, this site is a true reflection of the team of people we are, all working together to answer our scientific questions.

Here is part 1 of ‘2018 in stories’, with our growing knowledge on how species are on the move due to global change running as a thread through the year:

1) Species distributions in a messy world

We kick off the year with an important meeting we had early February in Zürich, Switzerland. The Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment (GMBA) brought together experts on species distribution modelling and remote sensing. The goal, supported by the European Space Agency (ESA), was to brainstorm around how the future of distribution modelling will look, thanks to the rapid evolvement of remote sensing tools like satellites. The conclusion of this workshop will hopefully be published in the next year, but the blogpost already lifts a tip of the veil.

2) Climate change biogeography

Our second meeting of the year, in Évora, Portugal, brought together hundreds of biogeographers, scientists studying the distribution of species, and how they change. At this conference, we discussed another fundamental question: how does climate change affect species distributions, in the past, the present, and the future? This blogpost summarizes shortly what we all know so far.

3) Matching the plant with the environment

In april, we published a paper on what makes invasive plant species so successful. The perfect match between plants and the environment, so turns out. And that match can even change dramatically between local populations of the same species within our little Flanders, as you can read here.

4) Plant species are on the move, and it is us humans who move them

April also brought the biggest milestone of the year: my PhD defense! In this post, I summarize the story I wanted to bring to the world after 5 years of scientific inquiry: plant species are on the move, and our human behaviour is speeding up that process, due to the way in which we use the land. Roadsides are a good example of that, with countless plant species travelling up and down mountain roads.

5) Trail adventures

We end this first half of the year with trail adventures: in June, I spent a few days in Davos, Switzerland to talk about polar ecology, and to hit the trails for science. I used this splendid opportunity in the heart of the Swiss Alps to collect data for our global trail survey. This post summarizes how that endeavour went, as a teaser and an example for any other mountain lover willing to spend a day hiking mountain trails and collecting data for us.

Growing database

Posted on December 22, 2018 by lembrechtsjonas

We have been receiving a lot of early Christmas gifts lately. 2608 in total, more precisely, from a mind-boggling 22 different countries across the world. That is the current status of our SoilTemp-database: 2608 unique temperature loggers, many of them with data from several years, and no clear sign of submissions slowing down just yet.

Click on the map below to explore the metadata of the database in detail, or visit our SoilTemp-website.

Next up will be 2019, in which we will start processing these vast amounts of data (while continuously adding new datasets) and try to make sense of what we see. Stay tuned!

Posted in General, Science | Tagged Climate, climate change, Database, Ecology, Nature, Science, Snow, Temperatures, Winter | 1 Comment

Research network

Posted on December 11, 2018 by lembrechtsjonas

Science works best when people work together. This is especially true for the big questions, that involve the whole world in all its complexity.

With our growing SoilTemp-database, that is exactly the type of questions we hope to answer: how are belowground temperatures across the world linked to the aboveground climate we all know, and how do these differences affect the distribution of species everywhere? And, most importantly: how are these belowground temperatures changing due to global change, and how is that impacting the biodiversity of everything that lives below or on the surface of our planet?

The growing SoilTemp-database, our main tool to answer these global-scale questions

Answering such ambitious large-scale questions will require input and expertise from scientists from all over the world. Luckily, the Flemish Research Council (FWO) understood this need, and now granted us with funding to set up an official Research Network.

Temperatures in the soil (like below this blanket of snow in the Norwegian mountains) are crucial to the life of so many organisms. Our goal is to improve our understanding of these soil temperatures at the global scale

For the next 5 year, the FWO gave us sufficient resources to bring together the leading experts on microclimate, species distributions and remote sensing from all over the world, to ultimately improve our understanding of where species are living and why.

We aim to make good use of that money, as we do strongly believe in the power of collaboration. Ideally, it will also turn Flanders into a knowledge hub for the worlds’ understanding of microclimate; a goal we are happy to contribute to.

The climate close to the soil surface is highly decoupled from what is measured in weather stations at 2 meter above the ground.

Posted in General, Science | Tagged climate change, Ecology, Global change, Landscape photography, Mountains, Nature, Nature photography, Plant, Temperature, Weather | Leave a comment

SoilTemp website launched

Posted on December 5, 2018 by lembrechtsjonas

SoilTemp, our project working towards a global database of soil temperatures for use in ecological analyses, launched its own website: soiltemp.weebly.com!

The website allows interested visitors to explore what the project is about and, most importantly, follow the growth of the database through an interactive map.

This map, courtesy of the Environment and Sustainability Institute of the University of Exeter and framed in a bigger effort to map all available microclimatic data across the globe, provides important information on logger locations, as well as details on time, height, resolution etc.

For scientists interested in using soil temperature data for their own analyses, this map is an amazing tool, as it provides an overview of datasets within regions of interest, as well as pointers to people to contact in order to set up collaborations. This is one of the key goals of our SoilTemp-project: we hope to set up international collaborations using data that for one scientist might be trivial, yet for another holds the key to answer important (micro)climatic and ecological questions.

The map is not done yet, and might very well never be: we will keep updating it with the countless datasets that are not yet processed, and that will keep flowing in in the future. For now, numbers are already bedazzling (and we are not even halfway through): 1867 temperature sensors from 11 countries, from sea level till 6194 meter above the ocean, and covering more than a decade.

We hope this coverage will only increase, so please get in touch if you have any soil temperature data you would like to share with us!

Posted in Science | Tagged Climate, climate change, Ecology, Global change, Microclimate, Nature, Science | Leave a comment

PCR

Posted on December 4, 2018 by lembrechtsjonas

It is official now: I am an aspiring microbial ecologist! What gave it away, is the following blurry picture:

Not convincing, you say? Think again, because this is the very first gel electrophoresis of my very first own PCR! A PCR, or Polymerase Chain Reaction, is the go-to technique to amplify and analyse DNA, and thus widely used in microbial ecology. If one wants to know the diversity of organisms that are too small to see with the naked eye, a PCR can help you. Studying the DNA of the organisms – and the variation in it between different organisms and organism groups – can give fantastic insights in that regard.

And let that be exactly what we want: link the aboveground patterns of plant biodiversity to the mysterious world belowground, where microbes wave the stick. But in order to understand this ‘black box’ of ecology, one needs a lot of lab work. That is exactly what is happening now, and oh boy, does that make me feel like a real scientist!

Posted in General, Science | Tagged Ecology, Global change, Labwork, Microbes, Microbial ecology, Mountain ecology, Mountains, Nature, Science | 1 Comment

Species (re)distributions in Scandinavian mountains

Posted on November 29, 2018 by lembrechtsjonas

I am happy and honoured to announce some fantastic news: this week, we got a 4-years Fundamental Research Grant from the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) to strengthen our research on species (re)distributions in the Scandinavian mountains, in the framework of the Mountain Invasion Research Network (MIREN).

A four-year grant to look even closer at the alpine vegetation of northern Scandinavia than we already did, aiming to check off some important scientific questions off our list

This major consolidation of the work we have been doing throughout my PhD and postdoc and with the whole MIREN-network, is a unique opportunity to get closer to the answers we are hunting for.

We have been zooming in more and more throughout the years, while our knowledge of species (re)distributions grows. This grant is another opportunity to delve below the soil surface

A dedicated PhD-student will be focussing on the dynamics of upward moving plant species along mountain roads and trails, and dive deeper into the role of mycorrhizae in this. We will do more in-situ experiments in the mountains and start building more on the growing long-term MIREN-dataset.

Trifolium repens, the white clover, has been one of our favourite go-to study species for long. It better braces itself to be bothered a bit more in the future!

This is another giant leap forward for our mountain ecological research, and we are thus endlessly grateful to the FWO and its reviewers for believing in the potential of our proposal. We promise not to disappoint!