I have made it to the expedition base: in the small village of Ban Naklang, west of Chiang Mai. The village is nestled by a river surrounded by forested hills: this is where the elephants live and where we will be hiking to carry out our research tasks every day. We stay in homestays in the village: wooden huts on stilts to keep them above any floods and any unwelcome animals. The village life bustles with people, dogs, chickens, goats and the occasional motorbike. I was woken up this morning by the distinctive loud call of a tokay gecko living in my bedroom – somewhat startling if you don’t know what it is.
Our base is simple, rustic , practical and comfortable. The main area is on stilts, with good views of the river, the village and lush vegetation. Colourful butterflies flit about and lizards dart about the walls. The weather has been warm rather than hot and the occasional rain storm has passed through quickly. A small suspension bridge crosses the river to connect us to the village. It is excitingly wobbly but perfectly safe.
The team here – myself as expedition leader along with the KSES staff: Kerri (manager), Cris (deputy manager) and Laura (scientist) have been busy preparing for the expedition: checking kit, reviewing protocols, printing documents and getting the base set up just right. Tomorrow we plan to go up into the forest to find the elephants so I can get the lay of the land. And on Monday – the expedition begins!
It’s not long now until the start of the Thailand elephant conservation research expedition. I have now flown out to Chiang Mai on my way to our expedition base at KSES to get things ready with Kerri and scientist Laura there.
Chiang Mai at night is bustling and busy and there are no obvious problems from the floods a few weeks ago. Kerri tells me that the weather at our base is cool in the mornings and hot in the day time. The clothing and kit listed in the expedition dossier will be fine. The elephants seem happy wandering around in the forest whatever the weather.
A couple of practical things: Please make sure you get a ‘True’ SIM card with plenty of data on it, before you leave Chiang Mai (available at Chiang Mai airport) . And download the KoboCollect app on your phone. We will use this to collect data in the field. Also bring any old Android phones you have and download the app to this too before leaving.
I’ll send another update when I reach our expedition base.
As a wrap-up for the 2024 expedition, we thought you would like to know what our scientist Dr. Jean-Luc Solandt said to Reef Check:
During the 2024 expedition we had to operate near to Guraidhoo (four sites) for most of the week due to the high winds. We also surveyed Bandos Island in N Male’ atoll.
Surprisingly reasonably healthy reefs just near to Guraidhoo island (Guraidhoo backreef) where we saw considerable damage in 2022 after the construction of the infilled back reef (see this report). In some (particularly back reef) reef areas there appears to have been dominance of lifeforms other than Acropora – moving towards non-Acropora genera such as Porites rus and Porites cylindrica that are also dominant at Baybe’s.
Porites species dominance
This was evident at Guraidhoo back reef. Guraidhoo fore reef, however, has not recovered its pre-development coral reef condition. Perhaps because the conditions are not suitable for both sediment and wave-action tolerant coral lifeforms such as Porites rus.
These patterns will be discussed in the 2024 report.
The 2024 expedition is done. Instead of waxing lyrical again, why not let some of those involved speak:
Thank you to all of you involved in the expedition. Thank you for making it possible through your input of time and money. Thank you for helping to build a unique dataset, telling a significant story of hope in what can sometimes be a bleak world of nature conservation, especially for coral reefs. We will have to see what comes of it.
So finally, honour where honour is due, here they are, our heroes of the reef:
Twenty-nine expeditioners from eight countries across the world joined the Azores expeditions in March and April 2023. This was the 17th edition in the Azores monitoring the movements, migrations, numbers, group structures and ecology of cetaceans.
Here’s a summary:
Whale watching can be done in a matter of hours, but monitoring cetaceans better to understand their spatial and temporal patterns and how they use of different areas of our oceans, takes years. Biosphere Expeditions has just completed their latest expedition in the Azores and is rapidly approaching two decades of monitoring, in an area of the Atlantic ocean. which is home to over 25 different cetacean species.
Cetacean data collection takes a decade or longer, to reveal meaningful patterns and therefore the value of our research cannot be quantified now, but it will uncountably be invaluable in the upcoming years.
Some feedback is more immediate. Images of sperm whales and blue whales taken this year, have already be matched to other locations in the Azores, and northern Europe. But many more whales have yet to be matched in our database, revealing the vast stretch of ocean they occupy around the Azores. Some individuals have been recorded for the first time this year, again contributing to our understanding of their population.
This year’s project still has a lot of data to process from over 179 cetacean encounters over 15 days at sea, sighting over 2,000 individuals. But some species are absent from this year’s research findings and dolphins have been found in lower numbers.
With the expedition fieldwork continuing in March, Lisa Steiner, the expedition scientist, an expert on sperm whales, expresses that “it has been great to extend the data collection beyond the normal tourism season and collect data on a range of species, across a broader time span. The value of this work is very significant as without Biosphere Expeditions we wouldn’t have documented the range of species, including several Sei, Humpback, Fin and Blue whales, since there are fewer tour boats out at this time of year”.
Being able to conduct field research during the ‘off-season’ reveals new information such as species being absent or present in lower or higher numbers compared to other years.
“The ability to collect such data is greatly enhanced by the annual contribution of Biosphere Expedition’s participants,” says Craig Turner (expedition leader), “and underlines the value of long-term data sets in illustrating the importance of the Azores for certain cetacean species.”
This data collection approach is being applied to other species of whale, along with dolphin species, such as bottlenose and Risso’s. The scale of the data collection both in terms of time and space serves to demonstrate the importance of the Azores for several cetacean species and highlights the importance of appropriate conservation management, to ensure these species continue to thrive not just in Azorean waters, but elsewhere in the wider Atlantic Ocean.
