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John visited Isodrones as sort of a ‘Mentor’ in 2019 in Costa Rica. For me (Matthias), John really is an important scientific anchor and yes, I would call him a Mentor as well.

The image of the boring scientist sitting in his laboratory, his best friend the lab rat, or behind his computer 15 h/day sticks to many people and many documentaries have somewhat manifested this perception of scientists to the public.

Unfortunately, we had to cancel our planned big 2020 campaign to Costa Rica, where we wanted to collect another set of longer-term in situ soil/plant/atmosphere water isotope data and accompany this with high-res birds-eye data from our newly developed drones (see below).

Monitor water isotopic composition of xylem directly inside trees?!!! Our main working horse on the ground got finally published, the Stem Borehole Equilibration Method. Its journey started in April 2018 in Sweden, went to Freiburg, Germany in 2019 (see related blog posts), to Costa Rica and Arizona in 2020.

San Jose, Costa Rica, February 2019. We rented a house in Curridabat, a generally safe area of the city in preparation for our three-month campaign to the ‘Estacion Experimental Forestal Horizontes’.

Isodrones is part of the huge B2 experiment when a complete rainforest is exposed to an experimental drought and subsequently rewetted from below and above. Listen hear to Kathi explain what she’s up to over there!

I am currently completing my master’s degree in Integrated River Basin Management at CATIE in Costa Rica, thanks to the thesis topic provided by Dr. Christian Birkel, I had the great pleasure of meeting and participating with the Isodrones research team led by Dr.

rocket science ;) ;) ;) Last week (9/29 to 10/2) Kathi and me attended the annual meeting of the German Stable Isotope Association in Dresden, Germany (https://www.gasir.de). The meeting spans methodological aspects and practical applications of all stable isotopes and is a great chance to interact with people from different disciplines that are working on isotope methods.

rocket science ;) ;) ;) It was a great experience for the Isodroners Kathi Kühnhammer and Matthias Beyer to attend this prestigious conference and present our first results. Highlight of the conference was definitely the presentation of one of the Isopopes, Roberto Gonfiantini who presented some updates on the long-known Craig and Gordon Model.

During this time I was involved in different tasks like taking soil and tree (stump, roots) samples, measuring soil moisture and soil fluxes, irrigating the study site, leading the construction and decorating the Isodrones’ “caseta” (wooden hut), digitalizing data, assisting as Spanish interpreter and translating documents.