ForseenPOMERANIA Scientific Camp 2013: sausages, sunflower seeds, beer...with a little bit of GIS & Remote Sensing!!

Hi all!!

As promised...today I will tell you a little bit of what I did in Poland last August!!

The reason why I decided to come back to the eastern part of Europe was the International scientific camp for forestry students called ForseenPOMERANIA Camp, which took place in a very small village called Wrzosy, at the Pomerania region in the northwestern corner of the country.

Palac Wrzosy (Heathers Palace)

More or less half a year ago, I started looking for a summer course that could offer me the possibility to learn something exciting about forestry; in a different country; and of course, surrounded by lots of international students coming from all over the world! Then, when I found the information about the camp I thought...WOW!! This sounds SUPER-COOL because it suits everything I was looking for! Have a look:

The scientific camp was organized within the European Union project Interreg IVA: "Development of a trans-border decision support system for remote and model assessment of forest dendromass in Pomerania region", which started in 2011 and its end will be in 2013. The project consists on a partnership between German and Polish institutions, and aims to produce statistical models for the prediction of forest above ground biomass in different forest ecosystems, and using different types of Remote Sensing information. The research is carried out in the Forest District of Drawno, and from the Polish side, is conducted by different scientists from the Poznan University of Life Sciences, in Poland.

During one week I had the opportunity to collaborate in all field work tasks within the project, mostly those related with the accurate estimation of the biomass in each single part of each model tree. Apart from that, one of the most exciting moments was when I cut my first tree!!! YES, FINALLY after so many years of studying forestry!! Now I can say that I am a little bit more "complete" as a graduate student! :)

The selected tree was a Scots pine of approximately 20m height, and with a diameter around 15cm.

Sample of the tree felled

Once the tree was felled!!

In order to make the camp even more appealing to the attendants, the organizers also prepared different workshops, which were conducted by two members of the staff in ESRI Poland, and by Dr. Martin Isenburg, the founder of Rapidlasso and scientist at LAStools (see Interesting links in this blog). This software is a collection of highly-efficient, batch scriptable, multi-core command line tools (with GUI and ArcGIS toolbox) for processing LiDAR data, that also contains tools dedicated to forestry applications.

Workshop organized by ESRI Poland: Introduction to LIDAR data management with ArcGIS

Last but not least....we even had the time every evening to prepare a bonfire and have some fun!!

Roasted sausages, beer & sunflower seeds: bonfire with friends!!!

But before entering that, let me explain you something that really surprised me. Did you know that in Poland they do not have lunch!! The schedule concerning meals used to be like the following: 1) around 8-9h, breakfast (everything like usual); 2) between 16-17h, dinner!!! I must admit that those dinners have been the earliest ones in my life, and I had the opportunity to experience quite many different cultures! I thought that having dinner around 19h in France was a record, but now...I think that now is going to be quite hard to find a place where dinner is even earlier! Despite of the time, dinners felt like something special! Maybe it was because the dinning room was all dressed for a wedding, or maybe because the owners of the palace cooked for us some of the most typical Polish specialties!!; 3) around 21-22h, bonfire. That was the perfect time to chill out with the other students and to get to know each other in a more relaxed way, while drinking some good Polish beer, eating tones of sunflower seeds, and roasting some delicious pork sausages!!! Evenings were absolutely great despite the crazy amount of mosquitoes!!

I would like to thank all the staff and students from Poznan University of Life Sciences for organizing the camp, and specially to Kamil Kondracki. Not only did I learn something new about GIS and Remote Sensing, I also discovered how forests look like in Poland (something that also quite surprised me, since most of the forest area in the country is occupied by Scots pine, giving me the impression that I was back to Finland), and all this together with lots of interesting people with whom I shared a great week!! This post is also a little bit yours since you made it possible! The perfect complement after finishing my master degree!!

Here you can watch a video they prepared about the week:

To all my new Polish friends....

SEE YOU ALL IN THE NORTHERN EUROPEAN REGIONAL MEETING 2013!!!

I am very excited about discovering with you one of the oldest virgin forests in Europe!

Marc.