sampling
Here I am, ready to study the fossil dunes of the Portuguese coast! During this summer I travelled to Portugal. Sounds like a big trip, but it is even bigger if you think that I crossed 450 million years! In fact, the reason of this…
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Ichnosummer 2019 has been a success! In fact, during fieldwork in Portugal, I discovered thousands of beautiful trace fossils. Now it is time to go from aesthetics to science, i.e. I need to understand the behaviours of those spectacular burrows. The beauty of these trace…
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This photo gallery documents my typical day on the field during autumn times. I check field tools on the beach, I start up my GPS-equipped camera, then I fit into the wetsuit... and then I splash into the cold water! Succesively, my fieldwork basically consists…
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Just as its name implies, a quadrat is a square frame. Despite its simplicity, the imaged quadrat plays a fundamental role in my research about modern traces of life-substrate interactions. In fact, I place the quadrat on the seafloor and then the traces within that…
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This photo gallery post documents the typical fieldwork day of autumn season: (1) Wearing the wetsuit and entering the seawater; (2) Placing a quadrat on the seafloor; (3) Photographing the quadrat with a GPS-based camera; (4) Counting eventual burrows within the quadrat; (5) repeating steps…
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Below the seafloor surface lies a vast, complex ecosystem, one of the Earth’s lesser-known environments. Here, marine animals produce complex burrow systems: What is the function of these structures? What is their distrubution? How did they evolve during the last 600 million years? I am…
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Today I continued conducting quadrat sampling in the amazing Ligurian Sea. This series of photos shows a quadrat sampling session - from snorkelling to spotting a burrow with a mound! Each and every quadrat-based observation is georeferenced by GPS, so that in the laboratory I…
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A major part of my on-going research focuses on burrows and trails. However, the geological (sedimentological) context cannot be ignored when studying the products of organism-substrate interactions. In fact, sediment texture commonly reflects the hydrodynamic setting. In the images of this post, you can see…
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