Amiens, the arrival

Posted on January 18, 2016 by lembrechtsjonas

Only 2 and a half hours of driving, some folks in a larger country might still be talking about their hometown then. But to me, it felt very much abroad when I was wandering through the biting cold at night in the city of Amiens, a city as foreign for a new arrival as any other city in the world.

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It had been a good day already. A quick drive without any trouble (except perhaps a bit of pondering on how it works to pay a ticket for the toll road) and an afternoon of very good and promising science.

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The evening brought time to think and plan ahead: what would be needed to reach the goals we hope to reach, what can be done to go even above and beyond them. The beautiful lights at the entrance of the world-famous cathedral of Amiens gave good counselling:

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if men could build something as beautiful as this giant, at least we should be able to succeed with the ambitious goals of our experiment.

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After wandering through the cold night and empty streets, it was time to reward myself with some food. Thanks to the directions given at the hotel, I managed to find plenty of restaurants. My eye was pulled towards ‘Manneken Pis’, of course a very familiar statue for a Belgian visitor, but they did not serve food on Monday nights.

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An all-you-can eat sushi place turned out to be the better alternative, I warmly suggest it to everyone visiting Amiens.

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Up to Amiens

Posted on January 18, 2016 by lembrechtsjonas

Winter has arrived. The first real cold wave sweeps over Western Europe, with snow and freezing temperatures. With this cold I will travel to Amiens. Not for fieldwork, luckily, as I’d have to take my warmest mountain clothing.

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Branch of alder tree on a winterday

No, the winter is for modelling, safely behind my computer, looking at the snowflakes swirling behind the window. Fieldwork is on hold till the summer sun is back.

But hopefully, Amiens will bring some nice stories and pretty pictures, along with the necessary knowledge to continue on the followed track!

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Eating villages

Posted on January 13, 2016 by lembrechtsjonas

The Port of Antwerp is very hungry. In the last century, it has been eating several villages and thousands of acres of land to meet the requirements of being a globally competing economic center.

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I find it interesting to wander in and around this massive economic monster, and study its behaviour. It feels as if the port is a giant dragon, ready to consume everything in its surroundings.

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Peaceful polders with the smoke of the port-of-Antwerp-dragon in the far distance.

On a sunny winter day, we hiked through the little village of Verrebroek, on the eastern side of the port and currently not yet consumed by the endless hunger of the port-dragon. There, it is only a grassy green dike that separates you from Europe’s second largest sea port.

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Nature protected by a grassy green dike

But that is the funny part, at our side of the dike, there was only nature and agriculture, and no sign of a port at all. This sudden boundary made me wonder. I am used to gradients in my work, relatively slow changes from one condition to the other.

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We study these gradients in the mountains, where they range over hundreds of meters or a few kilometers from the mild and more densly populated lowlands to the cold and desolated alpine zone. But next to the port of Antwerp, there is not much of a gradient. There is a port – a busy economic center with virtually no place for nature – or there is none.

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For travelling species, there is a big difference between a gradient of hundreds of meters like the one in the mountains, or one of only a few steps, like here next to the major connection to Europe’s hinterland.

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One moment, you are flying over your own nice little puddle, the other you are caught amid the smoke of the dragon…

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Christmas lights shine bright

Posted on January 7, 2016 by lembrechtsjonas

I received an amazing present from under the christmas tree this holiday season. It is called WakaWaka (‘Shine bright’ in Swahili) and it is a beautiful little solar panel.

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And now I am just holding a little bit of future in my hand: this kind of stuff is what we need if we want to realise any of our goals for a livable future. It is durable, provides cheap and endless energy wherever you go and with every one you buy here, there is one donated to someone in the third world without access to elektricity.

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For me, it is mainly a chance to get elektricity wherever I am in the field. Charging my cellphone whenever I am on a camping trip in the mountains, fixing my measurement devices whenever they start losing power, all of this now becomes possible. But for a family far away from any elektricity source, WakaWaka could of course mean much more.

A nice extra advantage for me is that above the polar circle, where I do my research, there is 24 hours of sunlight, so I do not even have to worry about nightfall to get things charged!

Important edit: it turns out that the donation of the WakaWaka to a third world family is not automatic, you have to go to their website and use the code that comes with your device to get the process up and running!

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Chilling

Posted on January 4, 2016 by lembrechtsjonas

For the next year, I will have four master thesis students joining in on my projects, so I will definitely be chilling day in day out (and this cute cat is happy to teach me how to do that).

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No, I am just kidding, of course. It will be very rewarding to have such a large team, but I will have to put in a lot of effort to guide them along the way.

I will have a student on four different topics. For most of them, all data is already collected (with their help), but I only glanced at this data shortly, so they will have the chance to come up with the story first.

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That last fact is important. I want them to have something new to discover, some science to do, some exciting and relevant stories to dig into. That is what I consider the first main pillar of a thesis under my supervision. The second pillar is guaranteed results. I have not looked into the data yet, but I am familiar with the experiments and datasets and I know that at least some important results will come out of it. What exactly, that is a surprise, but they will not have to go through the disappointment of a failed experiment.

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So I will leave the chilling to the cat, who is definitely better at it than I am, while I try to guide the students towards a successful and satisfying master thesis.

 

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A soft ending

Posted on January 2, 2016 by lembrechtsjonas

We ended 2015 with almost spring-like temperatures.

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The feeling of a new beginning was even more accentuated by the endless fields of flowers of white mustard and fodder radish we wandered through on a nice walk on the last day of the year.

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I was used to the yellow flowers in winter, but mixing it with the pink of the fodder radish flowers created an even more spring-like atmosphere.

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Such a monoculture (or in this case bi-culture) of overtime the same plant is of course not too exciting for biodiversity, but the flowers can be nice for those brave insects that still fly around with these mild temperatures.

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Note: I tried my best to get the names of the flowers correctly, but there are so many lookalikes (like rapeseed), so do not take my word for it just like that. 

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