Dear colleagues,
Half of the 2016/17 field season has finished, most samples in the northern hemisphere are taken. Thank you very much to all of you who have already sampled theirs sites and send the soil to Zach or myself!
If you encountered any troubles during the field season or if you wish to add any helpful advises for the persons sampling during summer in the southern hemisphere, please send me a mail, and I’ll compile all your comments before sending them to the group.
To complete the practical part, I finally set up the ftp-site I promised some months ago. The site is accessible via ftp://ftp-gnomo.irstea.fr with the identifier « gnomo »
and the password « zdtpl;12 » (both without quotation marks). On this ftp-site you find a first level with 2 folders (Data, Sites). Within the Sites-folder, you’ll discovery country folders in which you should find your site with the appropriate unique gradient identifier. By clicking on the your site-folder, two subfolders can be found, one entitled “Field protocols” , the other “Photos”. You can upload on these folders via Filezilla or a similar software the scans of your field notes (cf image on the bottom of that mail) and photos.
In the 1st level “Data-folder” I put the main excel file for our project, where you can add your sites. After having downloaded the latest version from the ftp-site, add your 6 lines (or 12, 18 lines depending on the number of gradients you sampled) and save the file under a new name by replacing a) the today’s date by the date of the day you filled in the lines and b) the initials of the last editor by your own initials. Then load again this new excel-file on the Data-folder.
During the next weeks, I’ll start with grinding the first soil samples before analyzing them by NIRS. Once I got the data, I’ll upload the raw data to your site folder and I’ll send you a mail to inform you about the progress.
For those who have not yet send their samples some reminders about the shipping already sent in one of the last mails:
We don’t explicitly state that the samples should be shipped with dry ice. Usually, if you tell the post there is dry ice in the sample they freak out and will not allow the package to pass. Therefore, we decided to send the sample in a styrofroam cooler, as there is enough soils and the frozen soils will stay frozen. We think that this is enough.
However, we advise you to just freeze the soils and shape them as fast as possible to whoever is closest (either Zach or myself). We’ll then send the subsamples to the other person.
Once again the addresses
Thomas Spiegelberger
Irstea – UR Ecosystèmes montagnards
2, rue de la Papeterie – BP 76
F-38402 Saint-Martin-d’Hères cedex
France
Zachary Aanderud
Brigham Young University
College of Life Science
I4125 LSB
Provo, UT 84602
USA
Thank you all very much for your contribution!
Kind regards
Thomas