The 3D lab

Knotweeding

Posted on January 23, 2017 by lembrechtsjonas

The river Zenne in Zemst, Belgium

It was a mess of pieces, like shattered bones on a battlefield. A macaber sight that seemed to add some extra drama to the story of plant invasion.

In between all the branches and sticks on the frozen floor, new leaves where already sprouting again. With the night temperatures below 0 °C for more than a week, these little green leaves showed Japanese knotweed at its most versatile.

You can fight and weed it as much as you want, it will always come back. When summer will be here, the whole shore of the river Zenne will be filled again with a dense forest of the bamboo-like stems.

The Japanese knotweed, or Fallopia japonica, is a fascinatingly sturdy plant. A centimeter of roots or stem left in the soil is enough to establish again. Against all odds, this invasive species does not depend on impressive seed production. In fact, up till 2008, no fertile male knotweed had ever been observed in the area.

With the needle-like pattern created by the over-night frost, even this bonefield started to look beautiful. Yet that did not take away the poverty of a big patch of knotweed: a monoculture, with virtually no animals that can live in it. A living battlefield, if you want.

Posted in Belgium | Tagged Belgium, Ecology, Global change, Hiking, Invasive species, Nature, Outdoors, Photography, Plant invasion, Science, Winter | 3 Comments

Global Change Ecology Centre initiates CO2 compensation of flights

Posted on January 21, 2017 by lembrechtsjonas

As I said earlier, we at the Global Change Ecology Centre of the University of Antwerp are working towards a reduction of our carbon footprint, through a more sustainable flight strategy and a carbon compensation project. As I find this extremely important for scientists to provide a good example here, I wanted to use the summary of the project that the University recently published on their website. May it inspire others!

In a first step, all work related flights at the Global Change Ecology Centre will be CO₂-compensated from January 1^st 2017, in cooperation with the project Wildlife Works. Dr. Mwangi Githiru presented the “Wildlife Works” project on November 15^th 2016. He provided information on the REDD+ programme and focused on the specific project area in Kenya that GCE will cooperate with. Wildlife Works has been certified through the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) and the “Climate, Community and Biodiversity Standard” (CCB). Compensation will be a part of a larger sustainable flight strategy, where absolute necessity of each flight, as well as alternate transport options and tele-conferencing will be considered.

The basic principle is that all research related flights will be compensated (not only those paid through UAntwerpen), unless another third party has already arranged CO₂ compensation. The compensation will be paid for flights of paid employees, postdocs, ATP, professors and PhD-aspirants on the occasion of:

Conferences, workshops, symposia, lectures, …
Sampling campaigns and field trips

This also includes the incoming and outgoing flights of invited guests, that were invited for lectures or cooperation talks.

Other research groups at University of Antwerp and beyond already indicated their interest to join the initiative. Interested people can always contact the GCE. Within the department of Biology, we have used the momentum to discuss the sustainability of the operation of the whole department. On January 27^th , members form the different biology research groups will join for a first workgroup on sustainability.

Posted in General | Tagged Carbon, carbon compensation, climate change, Ecology, Global change, Global change ecology, Global warming, Nature, Science, Travel | Leave a comment

To spring or not to spring

Posted on January 12, 2017 by lembrechtsjonas

Climate and weather might be more unpredictable than ever, yet there is one little thing I can always count on: a small patch of crocuses close to the office, that starts to pierce the often frozen soil already in January.

It would be interesting to mark the date of their first appearance every year, and see if they follow the global trend: spring flowers emerging earlier and earlier. They have been observed to arrive up to 4 days faster for every 1 °C warmer in spring, at least according to an American study from 2013.

They will have to show their best skills to cope with extreme climate though, because winter is far but over in Belgium. I will keep an eye on them, see if they manage to conquer a frost event. But my hopes are high, because early spring flowers are used to this yearly gamble.

Reference

Ellwood ER, Temple SA, Primack RB, Bradley NL, Davis CC (2013) Record-Breaking Early Flowering in the Eastern United States. PLoS ONE 8(1): e53788. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0053788

Posted in Belgium, General | Tagged Belgium, climate change, Flower photography, Flowers, Forest, Hiking, Nature photography, Outdoors, Photography, Plant photography, Science, Spring | 3 Comments

On the horizon

Posted on January 9, 2017 by lembrechtsjonas

What’s there on the horizon?

With the start of 2017, I have to start looking at what is on the horizon: the long run to the finish of this PhD.

The end is still far away in the future, yet it will be here soon enough. From now on, everything I do should be focussed on what comes afterwards.

With that horizon rapidly coming closer and closer, all I should now be doing is writing, writing, writing. The first part of the PhD brought lots of data, the end of the PhD can now benefit from that.

Luckily I love to write. Bringing the story, that is what the work has always been about.

So no worries about that upcoming horizon yet. There is no rainclouds on the horizon yet.

Rainclouds in the distance?

Pictures from a winter day in the Uitkerkse Polder, close the Belgian coast

Posted in Belgium | Tagged Belgium, Hiking, Landscape photography, Landscapes, Nature, Nature photography, Outdoors, Photography, Polders, Uitkerkse Polder, Winter | 1 Comment

From Alaska to the Alps

Posted on January 6, 2017 by lembrechtsjonas

Some very good news from our colleagues working on the Tundra Tea Bag experiment! The nice big blob on their map in Sweden/Norway, that’s us. Very much looking forward to the global results.

tundra teabag experiment

The year is ending and the data is in…and there is a lot of it!

Thanks to the great efforts of all those working on the tundra teabag experiment we have over 4,000 tea bag decomposition samples, spanning more than 350 sites around the tundra. And there’s still more to come.

teamap2 Teabag sites capture differences in decomposition right across the tundra biome

With 2017 just around the corner the analysis has now begun, testing three questions:

Does environmental variation do a better job of explaining decomposition than the type of tea? Or does decomposition rate just depend on what is decomposing?
How does decomposition of tea change over time and between the seasons. Arctic winters are cold, dark and long; does that mean decomposition only happens in the summer?
What aspects of the environment most affect decomposition rate? Is it temperature, moisture, surrounding vegetation, or something else?

With such a great…

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Posted in General | Leave a comment

An overview – part 2

Posted on December 30, 2016 by lembrechtsjonas

In these closing posts of 2016, I want to give you a quick (and slightly biased) overview of everything what happened this year, based on the ten most appreciated posts on this blog for this year. This is part two.

While the first half of 2016 had had a big focus on fieldwork, learning skills and optimising plans, the second half was mostly dedicated to the wrapping up of stories. Publishing. Outreach. Telling a story. We are learning important things about how our world functions in this project, and we want these things to be known.

Here are my 5 highlights for the second half of the year:

The little hut in the forest: This summer, as every summer since 2012, we went to the high north to gather more data. Our exotic destination: Lapland, the subarctic part of Scandinavia, where summers are short, yet with plenty of sunshine. Thanks to great collaborations and a good research design, less than three weeks of adventure every year results in enough data to keep us busy. A blessing!

Closing chapters: When you finally read the output of your work in the newspapers, it feels like you are closing a chapter. Discovering something, and getting the opportunity to tell the world about it, that is what science is all about! Telling stories; stories built on facts, yet exciting enough to enchant the reader.

Cornus suecica

The modern botanist: it was 2016, so even ecologists need to keep up with the times. The digital age is undeniably upon us, and we should take advantage of it! 2016 thus brought the increased implementation of modern technology in our fieldwork: tablets for data input in the field, digital pictures for plot recognition, a picture-recognition app to aid in plant identification and an app with which anybody (yes anybody!) can help us collecting data. Go digital, or go home!

How hikers can help science: For that specific citizen science project, we make use of the app iNaturalist – or your gps – to record a selection of plant species every time you see them along a mountain trail anywhere in the world. This surprisingly easy design will help us getting global information on how humans move species along mountain trails, without the need for us to travel everywhere ourselves. You are warmly welcomed to help us next time you are in the mountains!

Where we disturb nature, the invaders quickly follow: How better to finish this series on the highlights of 2016 than with our last paper: an intercontinental experimental collaboration between Europe and South-America, that recently got published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the USA. An experiment that answered many of the questions we had about plant invasion in the mountains, yet created enough new ones to keep us busy in the next year. So now on to the next one!

Hoping to see you all here again in 2017, with more exciting science. As for now, thanks for reading.