We had a fun morning in our Wytham Woods (with Mat Disney from UCL and Flying Elephants) research site exploring the potential of drone filming to see the forest canopy in 3D. All footage shot with a  DJI Inspire Drone. the view is over our 18 ha plot, with our flux tower visible in the distance.

Our Ghana traits campaign just finished in March, and our new campaign in the rainforests of North Queensland, Australia, has just kicked off.  Here we'll be spanning an elevation gradient from sea levels to 1500 m, andthe work will run from now until October 2015. Our collaborator is Lucas Cernusak at James Cook University in Cairns, and the campaign is being kicked of by our experienced postdoc Lisa Patrick Bentley and all-round handyman Topher Bentley, with local field coordinator Raymond Dempsey. Crucially, three of our extremely experienced Peruvian team (Jimmy Chambi, Paul Santos and Hugo Ninantay) have made the journey of a lifetime from Cusco (Peru) to Cairns, to bring their experience and skills to this campaign from the previous CHAMBASA and T-FORCES campaigns in Peru. They are also joined by Brandon McNellis, a volunteer from the USA.

The work is funded by the ERC Grant T-FORCES led by Oliver Phillips, with additional support from my ERC Grant GEM-TRAIT. Both are distinct efforts to look at the global distribution of tropical forest function and how it may change in the future.

Yesterday we had a visit to the New Forest in Hampshire, as an outing of the Biodiversity Cluster of the School of Geography and the Environment. The visited was hosted by Jonathan Spencer and Alison Field. We learned more about the complexities of ecology, social ecology and planning management in a complicated social and historical landscape. This was a follow-up from a visit last year to a different part of the Forest, and we hope to keep these going for years to come. It was also a good chance for various strands of biodiversity research in the department to interact informally.

Photos by Yadvinder Malhi and Uri Roll.