Thursday 29 July 2010
The end nigh!
Nearing the end of the soil harvest now - only a couple of days until we finish as we have 10 cores left. Its very sunny outside and we're all starting to get a bit of cabin fever. Thank goodness that there are eight of us working on finishing the cores today (as we have the help of Amy, Jade and Dave), therefore we're aiming to get six done rather than the usual of five a day. We already have 3 done and it's only just lunch time so we're well on the way. Hooray!
Tuesday 27 July 2010
Getting to the root of the problem...
...sorry about the poor word play, it had to be done.
Anyway we have a new recruit joining us! For a week Fabian will be helping us out with the core measurements from the soil harvest. This is much appreciated as Jade and Amy are now frequently disappearing to learn their individual BES specific subjects and the extra help is very useful.
Amy is now assisting Jenny with the Microbial biomass of the soil, which is taking a veeeery long time as something has gone a bit amiss with their method; involving some technical difficulties and the inability to understand strange Swedish machine manuals. But they are soldiering on and making some progress.
Jade has really quickly picked up the technique of stomatal imprinting and doing well. Hopefully Amy and Jade will be able to explain a little more about the techniques they’ve learnt here on the blog soon.
Lyanne is now acting as the production team as she has her trusty camera. So soon we'll have some videos to show of us working away in the labs, in the plots, the rough legged buzzard chicks (that are now massive) and other features of our time here.
Sarah is being the glue that holds everything together by making sure that we are keeping up the standards and not mixing samples and generally making sure that we're not doing anything stupid such as leaving samples lying around.
Matt has now joined us in the lab too, having completed the photosynthesis side of things. He has now taken the baton from Jade and measuring leaf area of each individual tiny, miniscule leaf of the Empectrum. They must both have nerves of steal - it's extremely tricky.
I have been carrying out root, litter and moss sorting duties mainly, which isn't as bad as it sounds as long as the core sample doesn't have too much of any component.
Apart from that there has been much music, singing and dancing to try and keep us all sane after picking out so very many small roots out of soil all day.
Anyway we have a new recruit joining us! For a week Fabian will be helping us out with the core measurements from the soil harvest. This is much appreciated as Jade and Amy are now frequently disappearing to learn their individual BES specific subjects and the extra help is very useful.
Amy is now assisting Jenny with the Microbial biomass of the soil, which is taking a veeeery long time as something has gone a bit amiss with their method; involving some technical difficulties and the inability to understand strange Swedish machine manuals. But they are soldiering on and making some progress.
Jade has really quickly picked up the technique of stomatal imprinting and doing well. Hopefully Amy and Jade will be able to explain a little more about the techniques they’ve learnt here on the blog soon.
Lyanne is now acting as the production team as she has her trusty camera. So soon we'll have some videos to show of us working away in the labs, in the plots, the rough legged buzzard chicks (that are now massive) and other features of our time here.
Sarah is being the glue that holds everything together by making sure that we are keeping up the standards and not mixing samples and generally making sure that we're not doing anything stupid such as leaving samples lying around.
Matt has now joined us in the lab too, having completed the photosynthesis side of things. He has now taken the baton from Jade and measuring leaf area of each individual tiny, miniscule leaf of the Empectrum. They must both have nerves of steal - it's extremely tricky.
I have been carrying out root, litter and moss sorting duties mainly, which isn't as bad as it sounds as long as the core sample doesn't have too much of any component.
Apart from that there has been much music, singing and dancing to try and keep us all sane after picking out so very many small roots out of soil all day.
Sunday 25 July 2010
Nuolja mountain
On our day off we hiked up Nuolja mountain, which is the nearest . It was a brilliant day and we managed to climb to the very top at 1400 meters which was a great achievement (even though we moaned about the steepness quite a bit on the way). We even got to see snow, which was quite novel in the middle of July. Sarah tried to sled on it, which in hindsight probably wasn't the greatest idea in jeans...
The scenery from that height was even more spectacular than usual so I implore you to go and look at some of the many photos we took in the gallery. Hope we're not too tired out for tomorrow's early start!
The scenery from that height was even more spectacular than usual so I implore you to go and look at some of the many photos we took in the gallery. Hope we're not too tired out for tomorrow's early start!
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