PhD Antoine Stier
TCSM Postdoctoral Researcher
Ecology and Evolution Biology
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has a strong impact on our everyday life, forcing us to adapt both our personal and professional lives. Many academics now face the challenges of getting used to remote working, but many tasks remain impossible to conduct from home. While essential empirical work can still be conducted within research premises in most Universities, conducting work outside the laboratory (i.e. in the field) incurs some specific challenges. Biology researchers within the University of Turku are not only conducting fieldwork in Finland, but also in various places around the world ,such as in South-America for studying the Amazonian forest, Myanmar for studying Asian elephants or some remote French sub-Antarctic islands (Crozet Archipelago) for studying king penguins in my case.
While many countries cancelled most fieldwork-related activities last spring (an unfortunate timing considering that many field activities are restricted to a narrow time-window during this season), we have been relatively lucky in Finland to have the possibility to conduct minimum to normal fieldwork activities thanks to a relatively quiet COVID situation and support from our institutions. However, conducting fieldwork abroad has mostly been cancelled and is continuing to be cancelled (for very valid reasons), incurring the inevitable loss of precious data. Continue reading
