The last fieldwork of my Phd is finished! While writing this blog post in Dubai on the way back to the Netherlands the dried seagrass samples patiently wait on the seat next of me, together with the other 70kg of equipment where I travel with. The first unofficial results are promising. On the aerial pictures …
Category Archives: Fieldwork
And it flies!
After crashing my aerial photography plane directly after the first flight, we retrieved the bits and pieces (the plane from the top of a 70m telephone tower & the catapulted-rest by logging a 20m perimeter of bushes), and shipped the plane around the world to get repaired. But 1.5 months later DHL delivered it in …
Green turtle foraging in Raja Ampat
Our second destination in our quest to find the green turtle foraging grounds was Raja Ampat. Some of the tracks of the GPS tagged turtles show foraging greens that travel all the way from Raja Ampat to Kalimantan. We were based at Kri with papua diving and did 2 short expeditions; 1 to Batanta & 1 to Wayag …
Green turtle Foraging areas in Wakatobi
After spending so much time on Derawan where green turtles are so abundant we wanted to compare Derawan with other foraging grounds in Indonesia. Wakatobi was our first destination. In contrast to nesting sites of which a lot is known. It is unclear where the green turtles forage in Indonesia, so the majority of the …
The latest experiment on Derawan
Just got back on the mainland. Last month we succesfully set-up a large experiment on Derawan to look at interactive effects of hydrodynamics & turtle grazing on seagrasses. This involved building 30 cages and 15 large underwater wave-bunkers for which we almost used al the sand from the nearby sand spit. To determine the location …
Checklist week 1 fieldwork Indonesia
And were back! To give you an idea of what we did before travelling to our remote fieldwork site, here’s a (simplified) checklist: Arrange research & travel permit, KITAS, letters for governors, certificate of good conduct police (10 trips, at least 3 days) Give presentation at World Delta Summit & follow EcoDynamic Design workshop Buy …
Week 2 Shark Bay
Beautiful seagrass patterns of Sharkbay: Let the fieldwork begin! The team: Laura, me, Leon, Fons & Tjisse above the seagrass patterns The seagrass leaves of Amphibolis are still full of red pigment after the winter period and make a really beautiful underwater panorama..We were very lucky with the weather and could work in extremely calm …
First Week Sharkbay
Before starting the real work we spend a week preparing the field expedition. This included a medical test, x-rays, discussing our plans with John and Di from UWA (University of Western Australia), arranging a camper, the necessary permits etc. Jennifer Verduin was so kind to host Laura and me in Perth. And we also had …
Gap regrowth, Macrofauna & Turtle-kiting
From Christmas there wasn’t time to travel to the internetcafe on the mainland to update this blog because we preferred to do some extra experiments J instead of spending 2 day travelling. Now, I just arrived back home and I will give you a comprehensive update of the work of Sjoerd, Sarah and me the …
Mayo tagged with Fastlock GPS
Udayana University (Denpasar, Indonesia) and the joint program WWF Berau, was so kind to provide one of their fastlock gps systems (Sirtrack) to track a green turtle from Derawan to study the movement on its foraging ground. Jaya Rata came all the way from Denpasar to Derawan to attach the Sirtrack transmitter. He has tagged a lot …