Fieldwork in Southern Amazonia

Dear readers,

After a long and busy time, here I am again to share my experience in the field of water resources. This time I'm going to talk again about the fieldwork topic (last time I wrote this post: http://goo.gl/aKz2yq).

Well, after spending eight very intensive months in Mato Grosso and Pará Stated of Brazil, I want to show present a little overview. I spent those months working in the Cerrado and Amazonia biomes, driving (a VW bus or a pick-up) more than 25 thousand km.

Basically I have three areas of work: the first one is Cuiabá (capital of the state of Mato Grosso), where the partner University and Labs are located; the second is Campo Verde, a small town about 130 km from Cuiabá, where the base for my fieldwork is (it's about 40 km from the micro-catchments I study): and Novo Progresso, another small town south of Pará, which is located 1,000 km from Cuiabá. That is a lot! To reach my family/hometown (Campina Grande), it is more than 3,000 km! By plane it would be too expensive and time consuming, I'd be better coming directly from Germany. That means I never visit them when I'm in my own country. That is my life.

Quick overview of the region where I work

THE VW Kombi, under my use.

The worst roads of Brazil. Full of crazy trucks.

When I was in Cuiabá waiting for the bus with field instrumentation to start my 23-hour-journey to Novo Progresso.

Where do I stay? Well, when I'm in Cuiabá, I stay in an apartment, which my work rents for me. Small, not a hotel, but enough for sleeping and taking a shower. In Novo Progresso, it's the same, but fortunately the apartment is bigger and has a bigger area more structure for cooking, for example. In Campo Verde I stay in an economic hostel, which is one of the worst places I've ever been.

Breakfast in Cuiabá before leave for the fieldwork

Hostel in Campo Verde - view of the bathroom and a bed made of concrete with a 5 cm mattress!

Hostel in Campo Verde - does it deserve at least one star?

The areas I work are 5 micro-catchments. The outlet of the each catchment (a certain point in the catchment stream) is the main area for me, but there is still a set of other instruments installed along the catchments.

Here we can see: an ADC instrument in the black suitcase + blue bag (to measure water discharge); an automatic water sampler (the big gray instrument); a weir; and a multi-paramater probe (black tube in the back).

The weir in the Cropland  micro-catchment and the sandy stream in the Pasture catchment

Setting up all those instrument tools (weirs, TDR tubes, tipping buckets, weather stations, auto samplers, water level sensors) was not easy. Why it is a never ending story: something always need to be repaired. Besides, the instrumentation itself is just the beginning, there is still a lot of sampling (soil sampling, for example), which is done manually. And the most important part: there are animals and plants who don't like me. See below.

Poisonous snakes. I hate them.. looking at you.. waiting for an opportune to bite. That is why we need to wear leg protection, which makes me looks like I have the legs of Iron man.

The moment I had an accident with the machete during soil moisture readings in Cerrado, and the result, after driving with that hand for almost 1 hour until we go back to the city and found a hospital.

Dead animals. Sometimes it is scary :)

Bees, huge ants... careful not to step or fall on those animals.

Leech (bloodsucker!). They don't hurt me, but getting out of the water with those animals on your skin is not a pleasant feeling. There is still a risk of getting an infectious sickness.

But the animals, plants and whatever else not only hurt, but they also destroy the instruments. Have a look in at following pictures:

Ants making the inside of the tipping bucket their new home.

Some animal (which I haven't found yet) loves to eat the tops of the TDR tubes.

Fixing cables and boards on site. Hoping it doesn't rain in these situations. 

Taping cables and pipes. Rats and ants love to eat them.

A problem that occurs quite often: mosquitoes defecate or die over the tipping bucket, then all the water gets stuck and we have no measurements until we detect and correct it.

Ok, but let's stop talking about problems and show a little more about my work in the field in those incredible places:

Sampling water samples direct from the stream (for control purposes) and storing them in an icebox for analysis within the following 24 hours.

At the laboratory in UFMT (Cuiabá). Filtering samples (vacuum pump) and doing TSS. The last picture is a scale we use to conduct a Phosphorus analysis when the sample has a very low P concentration.

When it is possible, I bring some instruments with problems back to the laboratory to repair and test them more appropriately.

Testing the equipment back in the field.

Collecting samples (each auto sampler has 24 bottles, and each bottle 1 liter of water) and labeling.

The usual scene: packing the car and transporting sand bags (each around 50 kg) to fix problems with the weirs.

At the weir: measuring and happy that is everything working fine :)

At the weather station, downloading the data.

Even the basics need to be done: soil texture analysis.

Collecting water from the overflow experiments at the Cropland catchment.

Doing a GPS survey in the gallery forests.

Machinery ready to harvest! And I was ready to collect water samples after it.

Two kinds of happiness: (a) work going well and (b) a good discovery, a small waterfall in the middle of a forest (with my snake protection) :)

Giving an interview for a local TV channel after a presentation at the Federal University of Mato Grosso.

Well, I hope you now have a good overview on my fieldwork activities in Brazil. Of course there is a lot more, most parts of the work are repeated daily (collecting data, installing/fixing instruments), but I tried to summarize it in way that you could see the most important aspects of it.

I would like to acknowledge to my supervisor and my research group (especially to Dr. Guzha), the group of soil sciences at UFMT (Federal Univ. of Mato Grosso) and other students, especially Jonas Macedo, Norma Bertao, Taciana Ziembowicz and Gilmar Torres, for all the excellent support in the lab and in the field.