by Michael Schaepman
July 27, 2013
Travelling far raises expectations and wishes! Also this time, we were well prepared with questions and wishes before leaving and we try now to answer some of them, prior to returning for more details …
Samuel from the soil group provided the team with tubes to be lowered into the soil at the Kytalyk site – this is well underway! Additionally, in search for a perfect plant nursery for this highly labelled isotope plants, we came across a well suited greenhouse infrastructure and recommend to establish it as a remote MICE station for Samuel.
Kentaro and Rie from evolutionary biology asked us to spot some plant species they are interested in as well. Due to heavy workload, a junior plant spotter team was put in place and it successfully discovered almost all species on their wish list, but was finally more interested in the more uncommon species such as the one shown below.
Wolf, also from evolutionary biology, asked us to look out for flies. Not regular ones, but dungflies. First, we needed to find large grazing herbivores in the tundra (producing dung J). Hearing about herds of 500’000 reindeer one might think of an easy task – but it was not. Luckily, we found a few grazing animals, but the dung was completely free of any flies (it might have been too cold (at around a few centigrade above zero) at the time). With the help of colleagues from Yakutsk, we learned that those dungflies are not abundant in this region and we are looking forward to a more southern location to spotting them! The junior plant spotting team decided spontaneously to convert to a junior animal dissection team …
Erich, a remote sensing specialist with a flair for aircraft, is provided with almost unique aircraft spotting images such as the ones below.
Finally Reik – a remote sensing Phd – volunteered to join this campaign. Unfortunately, because of many other obligations, he finally was unable to join in. We therefore provide him with a few impressions from the trip from Kytalyk to Ayutun (indeed, we had to skip Russkoye Ustye because of bad weather and unavailable infrastructure).