Cloud forest are extremely moist, montane forest in the tropics and subtropics. Precipitation ranges from 500 – 10000 mm a year. This moisture allows a huge diversity of bryophytes, lichens, ferns and orchids to grow.
Walking through a cloud forest is like shopping in a garden center back home. Many plants that we have indoors in Europe originate from these forests. Sadly, we only get a very small selection of the large diversity of orchids that grows in these cloud forests.
I have spent the last 4 weeks between the cloud forest and puna vegetation. The puna is a high elevation grassland at around 4000 m a.s.l. It is located in the Peruvian Andes above the cloud forest. The climate is very wet, because several times a day the clouds from the Amazon move upwards and bring fog and rain. The Puna has an high diversity of grasses, forbs, bryophytes (mosses) and lichens.
The last weeks, I have been teaching on the plant functional trait course about ecology, traits, data collection, data management and reproducible coding.
I’m in Cusco, Peru for our TraitTrain course were we teach students about functional leaf traits, climate change ecology and more. Today we were shopping material for the course in Cusco, an adventure! And now you’ll think we bought colourful fabric, an Alpaca, some Inka souvenirs… No, we got pvc tubes, metal poles, 5000 envelopes, plastic bags, measuring tape, etc.
I like to explore new places and to figure out how things work in different parts of the world. But it can also be tiring. Even more I enjoy to come back to a place where I already know how things run.
I have been to Chengdu three times. And I start to get used to this lively Chinese life. I get used to the traffic and chaotic driving and how to safely cross a street. I learn how to communicate without understanding a single word (on both sides). I can accept that there are always people around me. But in the middle of all this noise, I have found quiet spots. A student took me to the Wenshu Monastery where we had lunch and enjoyed a tea ceremony. And I learn to write Chinese characters. I could have stayed there forever writing a language I will never be able to fully understand.
I have a bit more than a week before I will travel to Beijing for a couple of days, in the middle of the Chinese holiday. A new adventure, a new place to explore and find out how things work.
It’s summer and we are back in the mountains doing field work. The weather is not always nice and it can be cold, wet and grim in the mountains. How do you survive a rainy day in the mountains?
How to best prepare for a scientific conference? Go to the field and take a lot of pretty pictures to distract the audience from your talk.
Not every day in the field is sunny. But every grey day can turn into a blue sky day.
Non stop field work! And finally I bring a camera worthy of this dramatic landscape.
