Here are some wonderful images from my student Anabelle Cardoso working at Lope National Park in Gabon. She is studying how animal and fire affect the transition between tropical forest and its variation over time. As part of this work she records the movement of forest elephants along the forest-savanna boundary using camera traps. Hence these amazing photos. I am sure there will be many more to come

​Last week, following the excellent ATBC (Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation) meeting in Montpellier, we organised a workshop on our traits campaigns in the Spanish Pyrenees. We stayed in dorms in a wonderful little hostel (La Farga) tucked away in a lush forested valley with a gushing river, descending down a magnificent waterfall-lined gorge etched into magnificent mountains.

The aim of this workshop was to bring together the results from the various field campaigns across the tropics that I have some involvement in, where we are measuring both plant traits and carbon cycling. This ranges from elevation gradients in the Andes and Australia, through forest-savanna gradients in Ghana and Brazil, and disturbance gradients in human-modified tropical forests in Borneo and the Amazon and Atlantic rainforests of Brazil. The workshop was the first time these various projects had been brought together, and was a chance to both share results and brainstorm grand syntheses and analyses for the coming two years.

The workshop was funded by my European Research Council funded project GEM-TRAIT. Like many British scientists, I have benefited both financially in terms of close collaboration by being part of the European Union, and it bis tragic to see world-class science cast into such uncertainty by the self-inflicted wounds of Brexit.