At this year’s intermediate project workshop (16.01. – 20.01.2023), the GreenGaDe consortium met in Potsdam to straighten common activities and report on the successful field campaigns of 2022. The team worked on collaborative ideas and grew on very fruitful discussions. Thanks a lot, to everyone who participated – in person and virtually!
Three highlights will remain in great memory:
1. Poster presentations: We chose to use poster presentations as format for the PhD students to present their work. Even if at the beginning, this was viewed skeptically, the students did a great job and learnt a lot by creating their own A0 poster. Communicating their own findings in a limited space and time forced them to think through their ideas and to formulate them in a way that was easy to understand - which they all did fantastically well! Together we put a lot of effort into the oral and written feedback for each student and we are looking forward to see some improved versions soon.
2. Invited Participants: On Wednesday - as a major highlight to all of us – we invited experts on our project’s research fields. Prof. Jörg Matchullat (University of Freiberg) and Dr. Souleymane Sy (University of Augsburg) spoke about their approaches of measuring greenhouse gases (GHG) in terrestrial ecosystems. With Jörg, we strengthened our collaboration and he gave us so many valuable advices about the usage of mobile gas chambers - the approach we commonly use in different parts of the world. In contrast, we were fascinated by the very different approach of Souleymane working in the CONCERT project (another WRAP 2.0 project of WASCAL). They measure GHG emissions with several eddy covariance towers at very similar sites in West Africa. As a follow-up, we decide to have a common training and maybe even common measurements at same locations with different techniques – what a great opportunity!
Carla Cronauer and Stefanie Wesch from the local institute for climate impact research (PIK) taught us about the climate risk analysis they are using in the AGRICA project to identify and evaluate adaptation strategies in Burkina Faso. Our socio-economic team members learned a lot from their experience with stakeholder interviews, how to train people to conduct these interviews and how to evaluate the farmer’s perspective without using scientific terms. Thanks a lot for all your great insights.
3. Interdisciplinary teamwork: One ultimate goal of our project is to work across disciplines and combine our findings to a more holistic picture. As a major step and within different constellations, project members sat together during the workshop week and exchanged their ideas for upcoming publications. By discussing output in different groups (within their institutes, within their focal team and within their peer-group), we came up with some very interesting collaborative paper ideas merging datasets across disciplines and countries.
Concluding, we can say that this workshop brought us all a bit closer – scientifically but also personally! It was great having you all in Potsdam.
