Planning fieldwork during a pandemic is challenging. We want to ensure the teams are safe, there might be restrictions to move between provinces, additional precautions have to be taken in case something goes wrong, etc. This must be done from a distance, as Wageningen is quite far from the tropical forests where we are collecting samples.. And then all of that comes in addition to the fact that fieldwork may already be challenging by itself!
Therefore we are very happy that the sampling campaign in Indonesia is now continued by our colleagues Mas Miftah and Mba Ulfa! They are currently in West Kalimantan to sample three more concesssions for the Timtrace project.
They are taking wood, bark and soil samples from red merantis. These will be used to test for chemical and genetic differences between sites. As said previously, this can be quite challenging, for example because of big rainstorms in the rainforest:
But luckily the weather was better some other days and the first site is finished already. Look at these pretty samples! Here in The Netherlands we can’t wait to continue the labwork and test tracing methods for Meranti. And we’re only a little bit jealous of seeing that pretty forest…
Mba Ulfa preparing samples for storage 
Bark samples are dried in silica 
Mas Miftah and the team coring a tree 
Luckily they also saw some sunshine