So we're now a week in to the trip, with 5 full days of scanning we've done all of the drought plot and half the control plot. The second plot is much harder to work in so we've had to improvise, using hand-made wooden tripods for some of the targets - maybe 3m tall. And just moving the scanner and tripod through the understory takes some doing at times. I find myself swearing to no one in particular a fair amount as the tripod snags on another liana, or I bark my knuckles on something for the twelfth time, all the while literally dripping with sweat. I've never sweated this profusely except in a sauna. But with 3 people on the target shake and bake, and me on the lidar, we're moving much faster than we thought: 13 locations today - 26 scans in all - which is our all-time record I think.
I went swimming before dawn yesterday, to do some filming of the sunrise for the ESA online course I'm contributing to. I took the camera they leant me down to the water and saw a herd of these on my way.
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| Little red rodent |
A dawn swim is a thing of beauty in a place like this. This is a screengrab from a 30 minute sequence where I left the camera running as I swam, while the sun came up.
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| Sun rise over the river at Caxiuana. |
Tomorrow, Lucy is taking us to a local school, where she is working with the teacher who organises the kids, the curriculum, the travel, everything. She's paired the school with a school local to her in Edinburgh, so the children in each can get an idea of what life is like across the world. What a great thing to do. I'm going to go along and scan the kids with the lidar, and send them a laminated print of themselves. Hopefully we can do the same for the kids in Edinburgh too.
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