Field Buzz

At the end of June, a team from Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences travelled to Welski Landscape Park in Poland to carry out an initial sampling campaign as part of the InsectCare project.

On the evening of their arrival, the Polish colleagues invited the team to dinner. In a restaurant surrounded by the lakes characteristic of the park, there was plenty of time to get to know each other better and strengthen the basis for good collaboration. A walk through the surrounding countryside afterwards also provided an opportunity to gain some first impressions of the park landscape.

The next morning, the actual fieldwork began. Accompanied by a ranger, the team visited four preselected sampling sites and sampled aquatic invertebrates using conventional Multi-Habitat Sampling. With temperatures reaching up to 30 °C, working in the water was a particularly welcome way to cool down.

The first visit to the sampling sites mainly served to gain an overview of the structure and character of the different water bodies. Their comparability with the equivalent sampling sites in the Drömling was also assessed.

This step provides the basis for meaningfully comparing the results from the two countries at a later stage and, ideally, identifying supraregional trends in the development of aquatic insect communities.

The following day, the team returned to Germany. Despite the short stay, important impressions and initial data were collected, while collaboration both within the university and with external partners was further strengthened.