The Stray World

I have returned to the urban land­scape, and the first thing that struck me was how quickly I wished to return to the trop­ical forest to do fur­ther meas­ure­ments on sap­ling roots as I read news of a 14-year old child act­iv­ist who was shot in the head for cham­pi­on­ing a woman’s rights to edu­ca­tion, or as this art­icle points out, for being a secularist.

The memory bubble of leaves and leeches with the camaraderie of fel­low research­ers now finds itself trans­formed into an energy source for emo­tional susten­ance. Tem­por­ary res­pite from depres­sion can be gen­er­ated from recol­lect­ing the truly enjoy­able exper­i­ence that was con­duct­ing eco­lo­gical research in Lam­bir Hills National Park.

日本の友達へ、楽しい時間は本当にありがとうございました！

To sum­mar­ise my work in Lam­bir, I was gath­er­ing data on four­teen spe­cies of dip­tero­carp seed­lings which could be divided into clay spe­cial­ists, sandy loam spe­cial­ists and soil gen­er­al­ists. 24 plots were pre­pared with 225 seed­lings planted in each plot. Each plot had a sim­ilar dis­tri­bu­tion of dip­tero­carp spe­cies. 12 of the plots were estab­lished on the sandy loam region and the other 12 on the clay region in Lambir.

Addi­tion­ally, to determ­ine any bias that would res­ult from dif­fer­ent light con­di­tions dur­ing the exper­i­ment, which was con­duc­ted within the forest itself, half of the plots were estab­lished under can­opy cover while the remain­ing half were estab­lished under forest gaps.

Me and my fel­low research part­ner har­ves­ted the entire plant down to the tini­est fibrous roots for our respect­ive assign­ments. While he had the task of col­lect­ing ecto­my­cor­rhizae from the roots, I would be scan­ning leaves, and meas­ur­ing the height of the plant, the weight of the plant (sep­ar­ately for roots, stems and leaves), and (in the later stages of the pro­ject) dens­ity of stems and roots as well as a term I only just acquain­ted myself with which was spe­cific root length.

As I have now proven to myself I know too little to explain these issues in depth yet, I will return to this topic (which will hope­fully be the found­a­tion of my Master’s degree) when I have become more well read on the subject.

With the pur­chase of a digital audio player at the begin­ning of the year, I have now found it prac­tical to con­sume pod­casts I had pre­vi­ously had to ignore vora­ciously, as I am no longer tied to the com­puter. A well earned return for Cit­izen Radio to my week­day listen­ing, with the past week’s epis­ode high­lights includ­ing the doc­u­ment­ary How to Sur­vive a Plague and the atro­cious pres­id­en­tial debates with no 3rd party can­did­ates (Demo­cracy­Now offers 3rd-party can­did­ate responses here).

So I am back, and it is now time to gather myself once more, and con­tinue the pro­gress­ive fight.