First days in the High Tatra

Hi all

So monday I finally arrived Tatranska Lomnica after 27 hours of travelling. It was long but the bus was quite ok. My supervisor here, Peter Fleisher picked me up from Poprad and brought me to the office building of the management of the park. There he showed me a room which will be my office during my stay here. After that he showed me the room where I will sleep the rest of the time, a house 100m from the office where I have a room and a shared shower and kitchen. But now I am alone there so don't have to share it :P. I was very tired and took a shower, went into the village and crashed in the first restaurant for food and pivo and went back to sleeeep :)

On Tuesday we already went into the field where Peter showed me how they are measuring the soil resperation, how much CO2 is going in or out of the soil. Soon after I continued the rest of the morning on my own.

Today I went with Jan, an entomologist to the west side of the park. First to have a look at an experiment site where some spruce trees were cut last autumn and half of them debarked and other half not. This to see how fast they get infested by the bark beetle. Now we only found one pair of barkbeetle mating in a freshly made hole. Soon there will be more.
After that we went to another experiment where he has a big trap for insects placed in the forest. He wants to know if you can see from the amount and type of species what the specific site conditions are. We moved one trap to another place in the forest.

My first impressions of Slovakia and the High Tatra's are good. Really nice landscape, nice people and until now nice weather as well. Around Tatranska Lomnica the forest doesn't look so well because most of it was blown over in a storm in 2004 (12.000 ha) and a year later partly burned, and a bit further up the mountains trees that are still standing are now dying because of the bark beetle (6.000 ha). But there is a nice view on the mountains and the valley, you can see the low tatra's as well, see the photos :) Today I visited the western side of the park, Tatranska lomnica is in the east, and there the view is really nice!
A problem is that only Peter and Jan can speak English, the other people can hardly speak a word in English while they also have so much interesting to say.

During the rest of my stay here I will be helping with the research here, mainly on how the forest is developing after the big storm of 2004 and the bark beetle problem. If the wheater is good I will be working in the field and not I will be in the office working with data analysis.
What frightens me a bit is that several sites are visited regularly by bears, someone went yesterday to a site to replace an intrument which was damaged by a bear.... And another researcher saw a bear with cubs few kilometers from the village near the road, so it shouldn't be that difficult to see a bear while I am here :P

For the photos you can have a look at: https://picasaweb.google.com/eshuishenk/Slovakia#

I will post my blogs in English because not all the readers can read Dutch :)