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A field trip to understand the forest
with Christopher Baraloto and his team
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©
INRA, Christophe Maître
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Here we are at kilometre 74.2 of the road going from Cayenne to the Brazilian border. A “carbet” (hut) is used to lodge Christopher Baraloto’s team during their week of field research. Curly blond hair tied back in a knot, machete on his belt and smile on his lips, Christopher Baraloto is one of the four winners of the 2009 Scientific Packages that INRA created to attract young scientists of international calibre. This programme provides a 4-year contract with generous financial means and the possibility of hosting a junior postdoctoral fellow and a PhD student for three years.
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Slide show “A day in the forest with Christopher Baraloto and his team”
It is pitch black when the team arrive, exhausted by their day in the forest collecting samples from 60 or so trees. A quick wash in the stream below and a hasty meal – much appreciated Comté and Beaufort cheese brought over from France – and the team get back to work. The leaves are examined closely: surface area, thickness, stiffness and chlorophyll content are measured. Leaf tissue, roots and stems are kept for future chemical and anatomical analyses in the lab. The clicking of computer keyboards and the hum of the generator mingle with the buzz of insects and the croaking of toads.
The data will update the correlations between the functional traits of the trees according to their habitat. The strategies of the diverse species will make it possible to better understand the distribution of species throughout the environmental gradients and to model ecosystem functioning. If within a genus, or even a species, the strategies diverge between habitats (low ground, clayey soils, white sands), it can be deduced that there has been adaptation to drought or defence against attacks by herbivorous insects.
The field team includes a scientist, Claire Fortunel, two PhD students, Greg Lamarre and Seth Kauppinen, a professional tree climber, Benjamin Leudet, to collect samples which are inaccessible with a long pole, as well as two botanists, Marcos Rios and Elvis Valderrama, who come from a team in Peru where a similar experiment has been set up. Conversation skips from French to English to Spanish.
The transects of the collections cover the forest on both sides of the crest of a hill of white sands. “These forests on white sands are called “tiki-tiki bushi” in Surinam where we find, 500 km away, the same species, whereas opposite, on granitic soils of the hill 1 km away we find a more varied flora. There are only three species in common” comments Chris Baraloto. In this sumptuous landscape, only an electric blue morpho butterfly fluttering by, the leaps of a dendrobates frog or a tiny and hitherto unknown flower in the hollow of a branch, distract the young team from their labour.
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Written by :
Communications Department
Label for the news :
Article
Date for the news :
2011.03.08
Date of creation : 20/09/2010
Date of last update : 13/10/2010
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