Last field and lab work of the PhD (2018)!
I have a great excuse to have completely forgot about this website: yes it was/is the last year of my PhD! But fear not, despite the one year delay, I'll tell you everything about my last field sampling in Manaus, Brazil, during the months of January-April of 2018. SUCH EXCITING RESULTS came from this campaign! Keep tuned for papers, posters etc.
From where do I start? Along December 2017 and February 2018, the AFEX crew and students helped in another fertilisation campaign, at the beginning of the wet season in Manaus. It was my first time participating in the fertilisation and man, it is a lot of work and we are so lucky to have such an amazing field crew that know all the plots at BDFFP like the back of their hands already. It was hard but a lot of fun to help fertilise all the 32 plots. More exciting was to see, months later, how the fertilisers are ALREADY changing our forests!
Before the fertilisation, part of our crew did another soil survey, our first after the fertilisation began in 2017. I was at INPA, in the lab, waiting for our fresh soil samples to arrive so I could do the extractions for microbial biomass and also to analyse for enzyme activities related to carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus cycling. Or course, I had help from all the students and lab technicians from AFEX that had to work overnight and during the weekend to help me deal with the soil samples as fresh we could. And it was a success!! In between field trips and extensive lab work, we all got one or two (only) well deserved beers and trips to the "flutuante", a type of floating restaurant/bar in the middle of the Negro river!
Then February came and I was very excited to see what the roots were doing after about seven months of fertilisation. This great team in the picture below helped me with the root ingrowth core campaign, which is always very demanding, tiring and some would even say boring, as we have to pick roots form a VERY clayey soil, in the middle of the wet season, for hours. But despite the challenge it was very fun, as we got to know each other even more, talking and picking roots. From these roots then, we got back to the lab and another amazing team of people helped me clean ALL the samples in only a few days. With these root fragments we could then scan to determine root traits such as mean diameter, specific root length, area and tissue density, as well as to analyse for phosphatase exudation.
Jessica and I were suuuuuuper busy during March trying to come up with a better protocol for the arbuscular mycorrhiza colonisation. This was particularly challenging because we had to take into account the equipment that we had available (and in working conditions) at INPA, the chemicals that are sometimes hard to order from Manaus and more importantly, the microscope technique that we would use to make our measurements more meaningful and more related to the other root morphological traits.
Doing field and lab work in the tropics is already challenging for so many reasons: the weather, the logistics of roads and equipment and chemicals that are always hard. During 2018 however, lab work was particularly difficult due to the lack of water and electricity at INPA during many days. Despite being the biggest research institute for Amazonian studies in Brazil, INPA is not free from being affected by the cut in funds that the Brazilian government started to apply years ago, mainly in education and research, unfortunately. I am afraid that it is only getting worse and a big part of the research that still happens in the institute, at least in the group I'm part of, comes from international funding bodies. It is sad to see a place where I spent four years of my life, basically abandoned, in terms of infra-structure. People, on the other hand, they keep trying to make what they can to keep motivated and producing great science: being creative, paying for things using their own money, sharing equipment.. it gives me hope and makes me very happy to be part of such an amazing team of collaborators!
Oh well! After struggling with the mycorrhizas, I was happy with the results, although it is still work in progress. In April of 2018, many of the AFEX collaborators joined us as part of our annual meeting, where we saw loads of preliminary results from students (including myself). It was very exciting to be able to share our results with researchers from other parts of Brazil, UK, Australia and Panama. These types of networking are, for me, incredible opportunities that can potentially shape our academic paths. The more I talk to people, specially if they are as excited about tropical forests as I am, the more I learn, the more I teach and the more I'm proud to be part of the AFEX team! I am so happy with the choice I made many years ago to study the Amazon. Even with ALL the challenges it is really rewarding!
Stay tuned for results from this field campaign!
More soon!
Lay