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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Castles

Posted on December 28, 2015 by lembrechtsjonas

Belgium hosts the highest density of castles in the whole world.

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The Gravenkasteel in Humbeek

With approximately 3000 castles, farm-castles, citadels, manors or palaces, there is plenty of beautiful architecture to admire.

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In the densily populated lowland areas of Western Europe, castles – and especially castle parks – are a blessing for biodiversity. It is there that some of the rarest but most precious habitat types are still flourishing.

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This kind of Belgium nature is a much smaller-scale beauty than the endless uninterrupted Swedish mountains, but I promise you the Belgian castles stand their ground in any global beauty contest.

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News from the west

Posted on December 23, 2015 by lembrechtsjonas

Every now and then, there arrives a much appreciated  e-mail with news from the other regions within our network. It is nice to know that they are trying to do the exact same thing as you are doing, but in the totally different conditions of their own mountain regions.

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The Beartooth Mountains. Picture: LRew

This time, the news came from the west, from the Beartooth mountains in Montana in the United States. Just as we did on our three day camping trip in Norway this summer (check it back here), they were installing sensors in all our permanent plots along the elevational gradient.

But fieldwork in the mountains has its ups and downs. And with an elevation gradient spanning a range of up to 1500 meters, a closed road in the Beartooth mountains definitily counts as one of the downs. When the road is closed, there is only one option: taking the bike.

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Picture: LRew

Hard work, but very well appreciated, and I’ll assure the brave biker: the final results will be totally worth the aching muscles at the end! And let me virtually invite you for a cup of soup at the campfire on our own Norwegian gradient to acknowledge your work.

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Soup in the Norwegian mountains

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(not so) dark

Posted on December 22, 2015 by lembrechtsjonas

It is the darkest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. Always a sad moment for those like me who love the light.

But there is plenty of little lights to bring us hope on this day. There is the knowledge that from now on, every day will again be longer than the one before. There is the little lights in my christmas tree, reminding me of the cosy weeks at the end of the year, and there is this amazing daffodil on my kitchen table, with the promise of sunnier times.

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With this little flower in mind, I have been thinking about this summers’ fieldwork today. We are planning to start a new plant invader survey project and I am collaborating on the research design. So in my head I was hiking up and down the sunny Swedish mountains already, marking species along the way.

But that’s for the future!

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Reflections

Posted on December 16, 2015 by lembrechtsjonas

We are December. The end of the year. My PhD has officially seen two years and three months, a bit less than three more years to go. I am truly in the middle of it all, and I am enjoying every second.

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The end of the year is the perfect moment for reflections, with this less philosophical one on a walk along the beautiful lake on our campus.

2015 brought me what I hoped it would bring: the publication of my second paper, one that I really like but that was not an easy task to get out there.

But 2015 brought much more. It brought significant progress in the two main papers that I aimed for in the next year. The first one is currently already under review, the second one – the one I consider my biggest story – should be delivered to my co-authors as a Christmas present.

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That means 2016 will create time and opportunities for what should be my second biggest story, the project that will bring me to Amiens in the middle of January, and at least one other smaller project that I had not dared to put on the list for before 2017. Many of these projects have been growing over the past year already as well, and I am delighted to see that I will be able to realise more than I thought.

Again a lot of things to look forward to in the next year, and I invite you all to follow it with words and pictures via this website.

Thanks for following me!

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