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Charlotte’s Antarctic Adventure

SENSE Student Charlotte Walshaw is currently on a very exciting trip to Antarctica to complete field work as part of her PhD on Remote Sensing of Antarctic Vegetation. Here she tells us a bit about her intinerary:

‘We’ll be flying down to the Falklands from RAF Brize Norton on an MOD flight and then travelling down to Rothera via the Sir David Attenborough across the Drake Passage. Then we will be in Rothera for about a week before departing on the SDA to our main field research location (Robert Island, South Shetland Islands) for New Years day. We’ll stay there until the end of March.

Whilst there I’ll be carrying out multispectral and hyperspectral drone flights over the terrestrial vegetation, ground-truthing Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, taking gas exchange measurements of the vegetation and helping with the data collection for the EcoSnow Antarctica project (NERC snow algae grant), which is aims to understand the past, present and future of Antarctic snow algae, with my supervisor (Andrew Gray), Matt Davey and Alex Thomson (both from Scottish Association for Marine Science SAMS).’

See below for a few pictures so far – we hope you are having a great time Charlotte and we are looking forward to hearing more about your trip on your return.

Charlotte is a student in the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh here primary supervisor is Dr Claudia Colesie.