Visit to South Africa

After the Christmas holidays I will be spending a month in the lab of Belinda Reyers at the CSIR in Stellenbosch, South Africa, where I hope to model the potential for carbon sequestration across the African continent. I hope to gain much from the visit - it sounds like their group is doing a lot of work that relates to my proposed project.

Finished

...literally and figuratively. I handed in my 99-page half-way report this afternoon. It was a good exercise in reflecting on what I had done in the last 17 months of my PhD, and where I'm going the last 19. I realize that I have learnt many skills since my start here and that I have gained much from the courses and experience of my colleagues. On the other hand, I also feel like I haven't managed as much as what I'd hoped to have done by now, and I hope to be able to make up for some of that at least in part in the next part of my PhD.
However, for now I'm exhausted and looking forward to not getting home from work at 11pm every night, and, in the not-so-distant future, a holiday in (hopefully) sunny South Africa.

While preparing for my half-way examination I have been reading up about Clean Development Mechanisms (CDMs), particularly in Africa. It's a little disappointing that many of these projects involve planting plantations of exotic eucalypts on large tracts of natural grassland (Jindal et al. 2009). That's just one more reason for me to think that putting a price on carbon isn't such a good idea; it just seems like one evil replacing the other. Having grown up in an area which had largely been transformed from grasslands to monospecific plantations, which harboured very few of the indigenous species and caused many of the streams in the region to almost dry out, I cannot see how these can be considered instruments to 'save the environment'.

I have been reading much about the distribution of African vegetation types - particularly what determines their distribution. It is interesting to go back to the 'old' literature, and discover how people with field knowledge only made the same generalizations that we find today with data obtained using advanced remote sensing techniques, which, in principle, allow us to find statistical relationships without ever putting our foot on the continent. In particular, I am impressed by that seminal work: Frank White's vegetation map of Africa. How one man could have gained an overview of the vegetation of this enormous, and often difficult to travel in, continent, is incredible! On the other hand, eventhough I am working with large-scale datasets, I find that knowing some parts of Africa is immensely helpful for interpreting the patterns I find. I do have to be careful, however, that my interpretation of the results I am obtaining for my studies is not biased towards what I know of southern African (and the little I saw of West African) ecology? I should plan a trip to East Africa soon, I think! :)

A late-night entry

Despite mounting pressure, and days when I feel like my PhD might implode (I hope I'm not the only one who has days like this), this week has been good. Increasingly I have more direction for the upcoming projects and I look forward to the legume project, which seems to be taking off. I am excited about the collaboration with the legume group at Kew, which, I am sure, will be inspirational and interesting. And, of course, I look forward to spending some time in London - I love the city (and everyone speaks a language I understand)! Let's hope it'll all work out.

fun at the museum

I remember how, as a little girl, I once got to go 'behind the scenes' at Pietermaritzburg's Natural History Museum. All I remember is seeing a (dead and decomposing and very smelly) crocodile in a huge bath being prepared for, well, I'm not sure what, but some museum collection. That's when I first realized that there is more to a museum than just the exhibits. And since then I have been fascinated with what happens behind museum doors.
So, it's been great attending a course at Stockholm's Natural History Museum. Not only did we walk through exhibits on our way to work every morning, but we also had the opportunity to see where the museum personnel work and store their materials. Yesterday we climbed to the roof of the museum - which was fun and a little frightening (I seem to be developing a fear of heights as I grow older!). On our way up we passed the dusty and almost-forgotten collecting materials, still marked, of René Malaise, who was a well-known Swedish entomologist and explorer. Today we walked through the 3million-specimen insect collection and saw, amongst others, type specimens collected by Linnaeus' students. For someody like me, coming from a country with a relatively young history of science, this is exiting stuff!

databasing

What I like about this Bioinformatics workshop is that, after all the presentations we heard and the information we have been presented with, we have time to implement what we have learnt. We have three days to work on our projects. The advantage of this is that there is more opportunity to get a grip on the content of the course, and there is opportunity to ask people in the know-how for advice. I know for a fact that, had we not been presented this opportunity, I would have gone home and only gotten round to this work in a few months' time, and, of course, forgotten much! So, at the moment I am learning to use mySQL (another language... sigh). ;) I hope to make good progress on setting up my Fabaceae database before returning to Århus on Friday.