Posts

Kathi’s first PhD paper comparing in situ and destructive water stable isotope data with the aim of further developing novel measurement approaches

In this post, I would like to give a short impression about my experience working in the Isodrones project with a background in engineering.

November 2021. My research group ‘Isodrones’ is growing and busy as hell. We now have three PhD students and two temporal lab employees. I currently supervise four MSc and two BSc projects.

What is success? - Publishing a manuscript? Getting a Project Funded? Gaining your PhD? I do not believe in such rather materialistic measures. But what then? – for me, success is being happy!

When I started to work with Isodrones in the Laboratory, one of my first tasks was to grind some leave samples. While grinding, the leaves emitted one of the interesting and wonderful scents I ever smelled.

The in situ isotope methods for measuring water isotopes directly in the field we use have undergone development and improvements within the last decade, but nobody ever wrote up how to do this if you are not familiar with such (rather complicated) approaches.

On January 18th, 2021, Mati was invited for a guest talk at the Deprtment of Environmental Science of the University Stockholm in their Enivronmental Science Colloquium Series (ECO-Series). The topic was ‘Droning on about UAVs & Innovative applications’.

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).