Writing a PhD is stacking one little discovery on top of the other, slowly building it up towards a big story.
Stacking
And it must be said: that truly is a unique experience.
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When leaves fall
Leaves fall in autumn. At least, they tend to do that if they hang on deciduous trees in temperate climates. Here, the months of October and November are dedicated to splendid colour displays and hours of raking leaves into piles.
It is a simple fact, this falling of leaves, and we all have seen it ample times. But even though the fact itself might be simple, there is a lot we do not understand about the why and how, and especially when.
Do the leaves fall becauses days get shorter? Do trees base their decision to shift colours entirely on this reduction in the so-called ‘photoperiod’? But what if they do? The decrease in daylength is a predictable factor in autumn over the years, but what if the temperatures start to change under the influence of climate warming? What if a tree is running out of nutrients? Do they take all these other factors into account, and which one of these will be decisive?
It is only when my colleague Matteo Campeoli recently got funded a big European project to find the answers on these questions, that I realised what a big mystery autumn actually is. And that struck me as a big surprise: how can we experience autumn year after year, and still not know such fundamental things?
Please, dr. Campeoli, make haste in finding the answers!
Haiku
Travelling plants take
Roads up and down our mountains
No legs, yet still fast
It does not happen often that scientists dare to take the jump to something as far out of their comfort zone as poetry. Yet we all agree that it can be highly beneficial to aim for a totally different take on science communication once in a while.
That is why we set up a little Haiku competition within our research group, to find who finds the best way of representing his research in such a little poem. A challenge I can totally get behind!
Is it not just lovely to convert something as ‘dull’ as this graph from our latest paper into the 17 words of a Haiku?
Non-native species (left) from the lowlands move up with more than 600 meters in elevation in the roadsides. Native species (right) from the lowland, get almost 500 meter higher by road, while alpine species from the highland creep down with more than 200 meters. Species with an intermediate origin do not move. Source: Lembrechts et al. (2016) Ecography.
Posted in Science
Tagged Ecology, Haiku, Landscape photography, Landscapes, Mountains, Nature, Norway, Plants, Poetry, Science, Travel
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The secrets under our feet
I have been saying it ample times: you can not understand the true behaviour of plants in the mountains without looking at what happens belowground.
I have been saying it ample times indeed, yet now we finally have the opportunity to actually investigate what is happening underneath the soil surface within the framework of all the other research we are doing.
And that is a big step. It might reveal some hidden relationships between plant and soil that have always been overlooked. It might reveal why one plant is moving up- or downhill fast, while the other stays stuck in one spot.
To get these answers, we teamed up with a new professor in our research group at the University of Antwerp, who is a specialist on the world in the dark under our feet. With our combined skills, the secrets will soon have to surrender.
Exciting results will follow later, as usual…
Posted in Belgium, Science
Tagged Autumn, Belowground, Ecology, Fungi, Landscapes, Mushrooms, Nature, Photography, Plants, Science, Soil
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Gathering a team
This is the time of year at work dedicated to gathering the perfect team.
We can promote our topics and research questions to the students of the first master’s year of the Biology master, and they have the opportunity to choose their favourite topic for their thesis in the next year. A small ‘research market’ where everybody displays his most interesting research projects for the students to choose from.
This research market is a good thing, as it works in both ways: the students have the chance to find a thesis topic that really interests them, and in dialog with the researcher even shape it more to their needs and interests. On the other hand, researchers find people to help them in the field and a fresh brain to help thinking on design and analyses afterwards.
I personally love this opportunity to take students along. Without them, all my work out in the mountains would be impossible, or at least take me the whole summer. On top of that, they often enthusiastically dive into the topic, dig up some papers I really needed to find, force me to think about statistical solutions in more practical ways and list the pro’s and cons of the used methodologies in the most honest ways.
So to me, a master thesis student is much more than a field assistant. It is a part of the team, a young scientist with a fresh set of brains that is indispensable to be successful.
I am already looking forward to welcome the next ones!
Posted in Science
Tagged Hiking, Mountains, Nature photography, Outdoors, People, PhD, Photography, Scandinavia, Science, Students, Sweden, Travel, Travelling
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The fruits of hard work
I updated my ‘PhD-cv‘, the page on my blog where I collect all the fruits of the work I have been doing over the past few years.
I changed the approach on that page a little bit, realising that the most important thing I should show is my (or let’s say ‘our’, in honour of all who help me with all of this) actual contributions to science.
Indeed, the aim is that all the work I do gets rewarded with actually learning new things about our world, new information on how it is working, and how plants manage to do what they do. It is this information, these little bricks I am adding one year after another to the majestic castle that is our scientific knowledge, that matters most to me in the PhD.
With autumn here, I am focusing all my efforts on harvesting more fruits of our work, so prepare to see a longer list soon!
The 3D lab 