It’s that time again! I am on my way to do fieldwork and I will try to post regular, small updates so everyone can follow along with what we’re up to. In the coming month I’m hoping to post at least 4 – 5 mini-blogs (depending on internet speed), so keep an eye out for updates.

It’s fieldwork time! Photo: Luke Gordon

I am writing this first blog from an airport hotel in Makassar. It took me a train ride and 3 flights (Manchester – Doha – Jakarta – Makassar) to get this far, but I’m not quite where I should be yet. A ridiculously early flight (4:00am) tomorrow will get me to Ambon, where the fieldwork will start. Doing research in remote areas is fun, but it also means 3-day trips to get where you want to be.

The reason our team (more on them later) wants to be in Ambon, is to do research on the biodiversity of Indonesian coral reefs. We are trying to investigate how coral reefs function (or stop to function) when they are affected by human actions like overfishing or pollution.

To do this, we will be working from a boat for most of October, hopefully visiting more than 30 different sites in Ambon and Halmahera. We’ve got a team that is specialised in different topics, people will be counting fish, identifying corals, collecting environmental DNA, mapping reefs, etc. Exciting stuff with hopefully some useful results!

Survey sites for the upcoming fieldwork

Getting everybody at the right place at the right time can be challenging enough. I flew in from Leeds (UK), but other people are flying in from Germany, Jakarta, and Makassar. Our aim is to leave Ambon harbour on the 1st of October, with most of the team arriving the day before. But sometimes nature can get in the way of even the best planning…

Today two earthquakes have rocked Ambon, causing quite a lot of structural damage. The boat (as far as I am aware) is fine, but unfortunately the damage to the city is quite large. Luckily human casualties seem low at the moment. In any case it is likely that organising the food and other practical matters in the next few days will be more complicated than expected.

In the next post I will go into a bit more detail about the science behind this trip, and ideally I will also have some updates about the situation Ambon.

Marine science fieldwork and packing lightly don’t go well together