I'm a student who is doing the experiment:

Decomposition rate Experiment in Nanjenshan, Southern Taiwan
I'm really interesting about the decomposition of forest.
We can measure the biomass of the forest, the seedling rate, and the decomposition rate.
When we put these together, we can figure out the forest is good at carbon storage or not.
Then we can proof the benefit of the forest, so in my opinion it is really important to do this kind of experiment.

When I know that the professor is going to do decomposition experiment. I ask my professor if I can go with him or not. Surprisingly, he said: Tok(yes)!!

Sitting in professors car

With Rock music!!

We bring lots of tools by car.

At first I'm just thinking that after we arrived, we are going to take all the measurements with us and walk for a distance to our plot.

Map of plot

But I was wrong( ºΔº )....

The plot is just near the road!! (╯‵□′)╯︵┴─┴

What!? we must spend about one and a half hours to our plot in Taiwan.
But in Poland we can just drive the car to our plot...

This is the boarder of the plots

The marks are where the location of samples

We only need few tools...

First, dig and find our samples that put it here a year ago.( Samples are wood collected by the same species of the forest)

There are four repeat samples

then clean the sample.

the tag on the sample is the weight before we put it into the soil one year ago.

than put the new mark on the ground.(because there are more samples for putting more than one years)

Put some branches on it for avoiding mushroom hunters to destroy it.

Finish!

After this we take the samples back to the lab.
Measure the weight of the samples, then we can know how many weight it lose during one, two , three years.
At last we can have the result of our experiment, so we can do some discussion on it.

It is quite different then what I've done in Taiwan.
We need to go to a Forest not by car but by our own feet.
Walk for about one and a half hours.
To do the experiment in the forest we must climb, drill, jump or even creep on the ground.XD
What a paradice it is to do the decomposition experiment in Europe.
But the tree stand are always the same, it's a little boring for me. haha

Branch marking~