Last weeks were busy in many aspects. First of all, we have to congratulate to Ludvik Christopher Matthew who defended really well his Master thesis on the changes of bird communities in regenerating forest. With one student out 😉 – we were able to accept one more new student – Anna Drhova into a Bachelor degree. She will work on the morphology of red-blood cells from all the birds we capture during our projects.

Just after the week of defenses, we all jumped into intense field work.

1. Jakub Pawlik stays in France for full two months, and other students will join him soon, to sample spider diversity along elevational gradient. He also gave an exciting talk at the Natural History Museum of Paris. We wish him, and to the rest of the team, nice weather in coming weeks.

2. The team remaining in the Czech Republic, led by Honza Kollross, carried out another complete survey of our SpiDiv project. All 1,080 saplings had to be checked, leaves counted, treatments renewed, arthropods sampled, and plots maintained. It was a full week of hard work for many people. The most exciting news, however, arrived in the middle of the week: our efforts were finally seen, and our SpiDiv was officially invited to join the large TreeDiv network. This means that, alongside projects such as iDiv, TreeDiv, MyDiv, ORPHEE, BEF-China, and a dozen other tree-diversity forest experiments, SpiDiv will now be part of this international network. This is a major milestone for our project and a great reward for two years of dedicated fieldwork … and little push for us to keep the diversity plots managed and spider diversity enhanced. Next week, we expect to collect our first decomposition experiment there, and our freezer are cracking under the load of the samples.

3. Finally, when we do not write papers in between running in the forests, Katka and Anna sit behind the microscopes and work on the red blood cells. While boys (Bonny and Willson) keep catching new birds and producing new blood smears.