Field work #2
Field work is the key to our research
As I study regions that are far away and hard to access, I have always been relying on collaborations for material exchange. Even though compared to other ecosystems, tropical alpine regions are somewhat small, they are still way too big as that a single person or working group would be able to collect everything they need for a research project. Imagine, the Afroalpine is just 4500km2, but can be found in 5 countries. All of them require different kind of collection and export permits - which usually take about a year or longer of administration.
While I have been relying on material collected by colleaques all over the world, one of the main contributions are coming from the National History Museum in Oslo. In the last decade, they went to all the main mountains regions in eastern Africa several times: Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. One of the regions that was missing were the Virunga Mountains in Rwanda.
I was lucky enough that another collaborator of mine from Barcelona just got a new grant funded to study Helichrysum and she wanted to collect some of the rarely collected species in the mountains of Rwanda. That was my opportunity to join and to see the beauty of these mountains with my own eyes and of course collect what I needed for my project!
The Virunga mountains are known to some of you, because of the mountain gorillas and Dian Fossy…
One of the difficulties of studying the evolution of plants is that usually the rare species have been only collected in a few occasions and often the material is so old, that we cannot use it easily for genomic research. Or, the species are presumed to be more widespread, but since we never checked we do not really know how ‘different’ or how ‘similar’ they are if they have been isolated geographically from the rest of the distribution range.
Collecting in the Virunga Mountains was very different to the field work in Peru. We had to climb up four peaks instead of collecting from the car. Definately my prefered way of collecting. We had to start very early and were always accompanied by rangers from the National Park. While walking up, we were collecting species we were interested in. Meaning, we picked the plant, put it into a plastic back with a collection number so that we are able to remember from where it was and took notes about the habitat as well as GPS coordinates. It often took us very long to get to the peak (sometimes we did not even reach as we were to slow collecting on the way up) and then had literally to rush down to make it before sunset.
In the evenings, the collected material was sorted and pressed. We put the plant on a piece of newspaper and spread it out that all morphological features of the individual are nicely visible. Multiple ‘specimens’ are then put into a plant press where they will slowly dry. Drying is an issue especially in tropical regions as the humidity makes it very difficult and some of our collected material unfortunately started molting a couple of days later even though we were exchanging the newspaper every evening. But as it was raining almost every evening and there were almost no direct sunlight there was little we were able to do. We used some ethanol so that the fungus was not spreading further on the material.
Exportation of the material was another difficulty. Even though we had applied for the permit months ahead, we finally had the paper in our hand a day before departure. All the material was taken to Spain and then the species I was interested were send by post to Prague where there were mounted and databased.