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 all research equipment (60 kg) from small shops all around Jakarta,
  • transport this on the back of Arifins’ motorcycle and busway to avoid being stuck for ours in Jakarta’s traffic jams
  • Book 25 domestic flight tickets
  • Get essential soto-ayam & es jeruk nipis,
  • Prepare 30 under-water cages at Wawans house
  • Introduce Iris & Peter to Indonesia
  • Visit the wedding of Arifin’s son that follows Indonesia’s principle: SMP (sesudah makan pulang; finished your food? go home)
  • Go to Open Science meeting (Jakarta) and give OSM workshop (Makassar)
  • This all with laryngitis under 33 degrees celsius in formal dress.

This time Iris and Peter will join me for their MSc. intership during this last fieldwork period of my Phd. Here they are presenting our new penyu-team merchandise. You can follow Peters’ stories here, and Iris’ on facebook

CERF fieldwork trip: Manatee!

 

After a week of CERF-ing (Conference of the Coastal & Estuarine Research Federation) in Daytona Beach, Florida, USA, I was totally saturated with new knowledge. So a great time to go out to the field & spend a day searching for Florida seagrasses near Sebastian Inlet. Lori, our guide never saw the seagrass in such turbid & low biomass conditions and even when snorkeling in knee deep water we couldn’t see the seagrass or bottom. BUT I did saw my first manatee in the wild, they came very close to us (± 2m). A cool way to end a conference!

Last Week Shark bay & Ningaloo NP

After some long days in the field we took in the camp kitchen. Fons and Tjisse worked all night to measure the photosynthetic efficiency of the seagrasses, which resulted in this cool picture:

Check the slide show for a report of our last week of research in Shark Bay. Tjisse, Fons and Leon left after 2 weeks and because we had already finished the research (and our research budget: Australia=super expensive!) Laura & me cool explore Ningaloo reef.

Here we saw a lot of Green turtles mating, and .. Humpback whales.. UNDERWATER 🙂

Now I am back in the Netherlands, and still have a month time to prepare for the 4 months of fieldwork in Indonesia.

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 waters. In September the water temperature is between 18 and 20 C and a 5mm wetsuit is still quit cold.

Tjisse and Fons are analyzing the photosynthetic efficiency of our seagrass samples until 5 in the morning

Thanx Leon & Laura for additional pictures!

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 a nice evening with Paul and his family.

 

We surprised the hardware store assistant with a list of the strangest combination of fieldwork equipement, from osmocote to bamboo-sticks, to plaster etc. And bought 800 dollars of food to survive the next 4 weeks in Shark bay.

After arriving in Denham, Sharkbay (a 10 hr drive from Perth), it was time to take a first glimps of the seagrasses:

 

And the local fauna! Including loads of Dugongs, Sharks, Turtles, Emu’s walking inside mangroves, Kangaroos, and sea snakes later on.

 

At the look out at Eagle Bluff we saw sharks swimming around the seagrass patches.

Thanx Laura for additional pics!

Off to Shark Bay, Australia

Time for some fieldwork! This time not in Indonesia but 7 hours flying further east in Sharkbay, Australia!

Together with Laura Govers, Tjisse van der Heide, Leon Lamers and Fons Smolders and researchers for the University of Western-Australia we will investigate the driving mechanisms behind the unique seagrass patterns of Shark Bay (picture below). Recently, van der Heide et al. demonstrated that banded spatial patterns in seagrasses (France) resulted from a scale‐dependent feedback between seagrass and hydrodynamics. Moreover, additional measurements showed that stress predictably influenced patterning in the seagrasses, hence suggesting that self‐organized patterns might be a useful stress‐indicator in seagrass ecosystems. Now in Sharkbay, there are patterns at 2 scales: Inside larger seagrass bands smaller seagrass bands occur, we will try to unravel the underlying mechanisms of their formation. We will post updates of our fieldwork on this blog.

 lat=-25.93828707492374 lng=113.92822265625


Visiting CEAB Spain

Last year I met Teresa Alcoverro and Rohan Arthur at the Turtle Symposium in India were we discovered that our research had a hudge overlap; we were both doing comparable work on ecosystems with very high densities of green turtles and declining seagrasses, and we only found this out just then. My lastest MS about habitat destruction by green turtles is in an advanced stage, so time to present my results at the lab in CEAB, in Blanes, Spain & discuss possibilities for comparing these special ecosystems of the Lakshadweep islands and the Derawan Archipelago where we both working in. Check out their great paper: “Implications of conserving an ecosystem modifier: Increasing green turtle (Chelonia mydas) densities substantially alters seagrass meadows“. Check also their interesting work showing that fishers of have been in conflict with turtles, and perceive that fish catches have declines over the years due to direct and indirect interactions with turtles. To be continued… (@ CERF)

Virtual Classroom: Seagrass Microscopy

The Radboud University has recently updated it’s “virtual classroom” with interesting microscopy pictures of tropical seagrasses and other submerged water plants, check it out, (Thanx Liesbeth Pierson)

There is also a movie in the virtual classroom (in dutch only) to explain students what kind of research we do at the department of Environmental Science .

With Google+ plugin by Geoff Janes