The 3D lab

Spring…

Posted on March 11, 2016 by lembrechtsjonas

… is now really on its way here in Belgium!

First flowers are coming through (with the catkins as usual in the lead), bringing the much desired colour back to the world. And finally, I can bike home from work in the beauty of the evening sun instead of the dark depths of endless winter nights.

And this year I am prepared to face the growing season. I spent considerable amounts of time this winter learning plant species, and I feel it is already paying off with the first ones coming through.

Of course, it is still necessary to see them in real life, be close to them and study them, but keeping my summer knowledge alive during winter strongly improves my chances to get beyond what I knew in the previous years.

And that is from vital importance in a business that relies as heavily on the correct determination of plant species as mine!

Posted in Belgium | Tagged Catkins, Flowers, Hiking, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Plants, Spring, Spring flowers, Travel, Trees | 1 Comment

Outreach

Posted on March 9, 2016 by lembrechtsjonas

Outreach is to the scientific project as the church steeple to the church. It comes at the very end, and might not take the longest, but you definitely need it to finish up a story and get a feeling of satisfaction.

The steeple of the church of Kontich in the evening sun

I am currently very busy putting steeples on two finished churches. The first one is a paper in Ecography, of which I am the first author, which we will try to promote through a press release, as I am convinced the results are relevant and interesting for a broad audience. There might then of course follow some more detailed explanations through blog posts as well.

The second one is a paper in Biogeosciences, on which I collaborate as a statistician. For this one, the outreach will stay limited to a blog post.

With these two papers, it has thus been a busy 2016 already, and we are only March… I truly hope we will have some more steeples to add to our churches before the year ends, but I assure you we are working hard to make that happen!

Posted in Science | Tagged Architecture, Citytrip, Ecology, Landscape photography, Nature, Outreach, Photography, Publication, Publicity, Science, Travel | 4 Comments

Close to home

Posted on March 3, 2016 by lembrechtsjonas

Somehow, smoothly and almost unnoticed, I entered a truly different phase in my PhD, and it is a phase I find surprisingly comfortable.

University building in the morning sun

It is that point at which most of the fundamental data is collected, when everything is getting nicely organised and you know exactly what data you have. A phase that thus clearly shifted the focus from data collection to writing and analysing.

At the moment, there is thus not much travelling going on, except of the daily routine, biking from home to work and back (the tiny travels on which these pictures were taken). But that is a good thing. Data analysis is a demanding task, that asks for my attention for an extended period of time.

Mist and morning sun

The good thing is, I know what I wat to tell. All the hypotheses for all sub-projects are already developed, and now it is the exciting work to search for answers within the data. And as I said, I find this phase surprisingly comfortable.

The 3 swans, art on the university campus

It is comfortable, as I clearly notice that I learned a lot during the previous years. There has been serious trial and error, but through all these errors I worked towards a wide arsenal of skills that I can now use to go out and beyond.

If 2012-me would have known me, he’d probably have been very impressed.

Posted in Belgium | Tagged Architecture, Belgium, Ecology, Europe, Landscape photography, PhD, Photography, Science, Seasons, Travel photography, Winter | Leave a comment

An elegant proof of global warming

Posted on February 29, 2016 by lembrechtsjonas

An easy yet elegant experiment to prove the role of carbon dioxide in global warming and show its effect to children, that was the question my colleagues were working on. The experiment is in fact really elegant, so I am happy to share it with you.

Experimental set-up, with from bottom to top: a glass of hot water, a tube with carbon dioxide and a thermal camera

What you need is in the first place a tube, connected to a carbon dioxide source (our imaginative atmosphere). At one end of the tube, there comes a warm object (a candle, a glass of hot water, the earth, or anything else you have at hand), the other side of the tube is guarded by the thermal camera (the exact reason why I got involved, as thermal camera specialist).

The thermal camera

The thermal camera will pick up the temperature of the warm object through the recording of infrared radiation. However, if we pump the invisible gas carbon dioxide into the tube, the temperature shown on the monitor will go down!

Interestingly, it is not really the temperature of our candle that is not really going down. The candle gives of infrared radiation, the camera records exactly that. However, carbon dioxide is highly effective in absorbing this infrared radiation (at least part of it), which is exactly why we call it a greenhouse gas. The heath will not be able to escape through the tube and get recorded by the camera, so the temperature appears lower.

The same thing would appear on our screen if we would imagine the thermal camera looking from outer space towards our earth. Earth omits heath as infrared radiation, our imaginative camera records it. However, several particles in our atmosphere, of which carbon dioxide is the most famous one, absorb this radiation and keep it trapped. The temperature of the earth gets higher, as less heath can escape towards our ‘thermal camera’ and outer space. So: the temperature on the camera appears lower, exactly because our candle/earth is warmer (which is an important sentence to grasp the meaning of the experiment).

Pressure gauge of the bottle with carbon dioxide

It took us some finetuning of the temperature range of the camera, but in the end we managed to show the pattern as nicely as the scientists in this video. Now, my colleagues will take this little experiment to the children’s university at the end of this week, to give a bunch of 8 till 14-year-olds an awesome day, a nice encounter with science and a reasonable idea of how global warming works.

Posted in Science | Tagged Climate, climate change, Ecology, Experiments, Global, Global warming, Nature, Photography, Science, University | Leave a comment

A reward for 2012-me

Posted on February 25, 2016 by lembrechtsjonas

Let’s go back to summer 2012. I am working on my masters thesis in Norway in what was arguably the wettest fieldwork summer till today.

Empetrum hermaphroditum, one of the main species of the native vegetation in our experimental plots.

Aim of the project was at first to get an idea of the distribution of the non-native species along the mountain roads from the Norwegian fjords till the highest elevation.

But when we were on it, sampling plants along these roads for a month, we discovered that many other species showed peculiar patterns as well. Not only the non-native species seemed to be affected by the roads, several native species saw their distributions altered as well.

A discovery that made me very excited, especially because we had not really been looking for it.

And yet, despite all the excitement, we did not have sufficient data at that time to prove what we were observing. I had to be patient, wait for more data – from our MIREN colleagues – and try a more elaborate approach later.

And now, finally, almost 4 years later, we will publish these exciting patterns we observed in 2012. We are finalising the global paper that shows what we wanted to show, and thus, very soon, I will be able to give a beautiful present to 2012-me. A present that will make him very happy.

Posted in Norway, Science | Tagged arctic, Ecology, Landscape photography, Mountains, Nature photography, Norway, Photography, Plants, Publishing, Scandinavia, Science, Travel | 2 Comments

A mildly booming business

Posted on February 23, 2016 by lembrechtsjonas

We have been spending considerable amount of time uploading my pictures on Fotolia, one of the main websites for stock photography.

The Louvre museum in Paris, on my way home after a work visit to Loches, France

It is a lot of work to get them on there, but the occasional reward makes it a lot of fun. You can find my ever-growing portfolio here.

Shakespeares Globe in London, on holiday

I currently have almost 3000 pictures online, and sold more than 350 of them, which makes me mildly proud. It is never gonna make me rich (and you definitely do not want to calculate how very little we earn for an hour of work!), but selling 350 pictures is tremendously more than I would have ever thought possible.

A guanaco in the Chilean Andes, after an experimental field campaign

It is funny to see what kind of pictures sell the easiest. This posts shows some of the bestsellers in my portfolio, and it is immediately clear that exotic travel destinations do very well.

Cows in a Patagonian valley, after a field campaign in Chile

Landscapes, but also famous cityviews are thus high on the list, but they contrast sharply with the dull pictures that seem to get at least as much attention: car parks, traffic signs, spoons, the more ‘normal’ it is, the easier it sells.

Car park of the airport in Bariloche, Argentina, after a meeting with colleagues

But surprisingly, even my work seems to sell, as illustrated by this detail of stress measurements on our university campus.

Measuring fluorescence in colonisers of experimental gaps at the university, Antwerp, Belgium

For someone who likes to make pictures as an extra to his main job in ecological research, selling some pictures through Fotolia is a nice reward. I will never be able to resist the urge to make pictures anyway, so better make the most of it!