It’s been long since the last blog post! It’s not like we were twiddling our thumbs though, nothing is more like it!
Gabon
Barbara and Laura finally made it to the forest again. We’re currently in Gabon and finished a great sampling campaign at Precious Woods Gabon. Together with our partners from the National Herbarium Gabon (IPHAMETRA/CENAREST) and the Research Institute for Tropical Ecology (IRET) we sampled both for Timtrace and the World Forest ID Project.
And how nice it was to see some trees again! We finished three sites: one for Azobe, one for Tali and one with both species. Along the way we collected a variety of species for WFID: Padouk, Okoume, Tali, .. Even though we had some small complications (generators not working, drills going blunt, trees not occurring close enough to our liking), we finished the sampling in good time. The samples will now be packed and hopefully we can take them to Wageningen with us later this week. So more data is coming!
Tali crown. 
Laura and Barbara, back in the forest! 
The PreciousWoods team. 
Wood sampling (left) and bark sampling (right) from a fresh Tali stump.
Indonesia
And at the same time, Ulfa is fighting floods to make it to our sites in West Kalimantan!
Covid, conflicts and heavy rainfall have made it very challenging to continue sampling on Kalimantan, but luckily the team made it. In the pictures below, Ulfa is on her way to the preparation meeting with the management from Sari Bumi Kusuma shortly before going to the forest. The red Merantis were plenty in their concession, so they will be added to the Timtrace dataset at IPB University in Bogor.
Ulfa on her way to Sari Bumi Kusuma. 
The management meeting.
A big thank you to all our partners for making all this possible!! Now it’s time to plan the lab work again and to process all these new samples.