Exciting times ahead

So I've just heard that we (myself, Simon and Lewis) were awarded the NERC grant we applied for back in January this year "Weighing trees with lasers: reducing uncertainty in tropical forest biomass and allometry". I'm still awaiting the final confirmation that we got the budgets we asked for and so on, but this will provide us with a postdoc for 3 years, and travel money to deploy the TLS across 3 continents, at 4 or 5 contrasting tropical forest sites. The project will enable us to scan several 1000s of trees and estimate above-ground biomass, as well as look at structure and size of trees across contrasting environments and climate regimes in the tropics. We will get to revisit sites in Gabon, and Brazil to see how they've changed in 2-3 years, as well as several new (to me anyway!) sites in Peru and SE Asia. We've also got a range of really exciting collaborations lined up, academic, industry and for our impact plans to bring our research to a range of schools, as well as new visualisations of the 3D data. We'll also be contributing directly to new satellite missions through calibration and validation datasets, most notably the ESA BIOMASS and NASA GEDI missions.

So, some exciting times ahead. And a valuable lesson learned: avoid writing proposals with 2 co-I's with the same surname  - it's very confusing.