After the successful submission of two grants from our laboratory to Grant Agency of Czech Republic (PI Katka Sam and David Diez Mendez – fingers crossed for them), we kicked out or continue several field projects.

1. Honza Kollross continues with his exclosure experiments close to Motovidlo pond. His trees are doing well, but cages were damaged and after we fixed them, some of them got stolen. Hopefully, all will be good now.
2. Xue re-started her greenhouse with Ficus trees in Czech Republic as borders of Papua New Guinea are still tightly closed and the chances of getting there are very low. At the same time, Xue continues to manage the drought experiment in natural habitatsi n PNG from distance. And finally, thanks to Kore, her first samples reached our freezer in Czech today. Time to welcome Kore back in Czech once he leaves his separation and gets final negative PCR tests.
3. For the same reason, Honza Lenc started “his” collection for master thesis only thanks to a great help of Bonny Koane. Day/night activity of ants is being surveyd there while Honza will continue some collections in Czech to make his Bachelor thesis publishable.

Beside our own experiments running now, we have several collaborations going on – with Oak Bodyguards and Romero’s decomposition experiment, and earlier mentioned LIFEPLAN. I am sure more field work will start as the season develops and we recover from the intense grant writing :-).