Dr. Lowman is featured in this article in La Vanguardia (Catalonia’s leading daily newspaper). “El Techo de los bosques es el octavo continente” PDF of the original article Spanish text of the article Text of article translated to English using Google Translate
Here are a few of the critters we were surveying — got 135 birds, but all but about 11 were outside the church forests. We got over 3000 insects as mentioned earlier, with a large portion Diptera and also Coleoptera. Of note many of the Coleoptera tend to be dung beetles (exact counts to follow) […]
We are in our final phases of the Ethiopia expedition, with over 3000 insects logged by various field methods, over 1000-person hours of field time, and several thousand hours of field work yet to process back in our labs and libraries at home institutions. The project was overwhelming and inspirational. We are humbled by the […]
Dr. Catherine Cardelús writes about the epiphytes they have found in the church forests of Ethiopia so far: I am thrilled that we have epiphytes! Thus far I have found 5 species of epiphytic ferns at the low elevation site, Zhara, and 4 species of epiphytic ferns at the higher elevation, Debresena. One species overlaps […]
Some various photos from our activities in the field here in Ethiopia:
We awoke to a heavy downpour so have postponed our morning checking for insects to this afternoon. Meantime, the holy mass takes place a noon, so we will not be able to access the Church forest until the mass is over. Our projected field time is 2 pm — most of the people walk many […]
Photos of a few members of the biodiversity team working in the church forests of Ethiopia: Dr. Cat Cardelus from Colgate University Dr. Neville Winchester, University of British Columbia Dr. Hal Heatwole, North Carolina State University
In addition to the 3 species we sampled in the Debresena church forest on our first day here in our second week of the expedition, we are focusing on a species in the same family as cherry trees. It is called Prunus africana (Prunus is also the genus of cherry). This Prunus is very important […]
We were so happy to find a newish hotel in Debre Tabor, complete with showers! However, last night was a huge and blustery rain storm, closing the noisy disco in the alley next door (a blessing!) but also flooding some of our rooms and also cutting off electricity. So we awoke to no showers, no […]
We have finished our first church forest, called Zhara. Today we travel about 4 hours by four-wheel drive to a small town called Debre Tabor where we will work in a second church forest called Debresena. Ambitious students can probably locate them on Google-earth. We look forward to comparing the differences between the two, and […]
