What is your Profession?

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

What type of research are you involved in?

我对带有常规图案的风景非常感兴趣。经常间隔的草或树木，石头或土墩在全球范围内广泛分布。我在生态学方面的研究特别关注地球丘模式。

The excitement I felt 10 years ago when I first saw these mounds never went away.

I am working as part of a team (led by Professor Doyle McKey, Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive, Montpellier, France) that comprises ecologists, soil scientists and archaeobotanists. Collaboratively, we aim at understanding the processes (biological, physical or the interaction of the two) that generate earth mounds and create regularity, and the environmental factors that may affect the size and shape of mounds.

作为一名现场生态学家，我研究了土墩的存在如何影响生物多样性的空间分布，例如植物和土壤生物（其中包括社会昆虫和earths）。我还将现场工作与遥感相结合，问为什么在某些地方而不是在其他地方出现地球丘，以及它们如何在时间上变化或死亡？

您为什么对这一研究领域感兴趣？

My journey with earth-mound landscapes started during fieldwork for my Master’s degree in French Guianan coastal savannas in 2006. Walking among the mounds and watching them from the air just blew my mind.

At that time, we did not know much about these mounds. Archaeologists and ecologists were actively debating their origin: the first thought they were human-made for agricultural purposes while the second thought they were made by termites or earthworms.

The sort of mystery around the origin of the mounds, the fact that we did not know anything about their ecology, was really exciting. I dedicated part of my Master and all my PhD study to these landscapes. The excitement I felt 10 years ago when I first saw these mounds never went away.

How did you become interested in photography?

航拍照片是科学家的非常有趣的支持。航空摄影为风景提供了全新的视角。它基本上扩大了我们的观点。在学习如何用无人机拍摄航空照片本身很有趣，但我还学会了如何使用这些图像来映射土墩，并根据规律性，大小和方向在大面积上统计分析其空间模式。

Photography is also a powerful support for communicating our research – aerial pictures of our landscape captivate the public.

Where and how was this photo taken?

我用遥控无人机在哥伦比亚拍摄了这张照片PIXY(©IRD).

Why were you there at the time?

I went to Colombia, more specifically to a wide area of savanna grassland called Llanos del Orinoco, to study mysterious earth-mound landscapes called “surales”. These savannas are flooded during the rainy season and only the top of the mounds emerge above water level.

Can you explain a bit more about the image?

The photo shows hundreds of earth mounds that are are created by a large, yet unknown, species of earthworm. Mounds are initiated when large earthworms feed in shallowly flooded soils, depositing casts (i.e. earthworm feces) that form‘塔’above water level. Using permanent galleries in the soil, each earthworm returns repeatedly to the same spot to deposit casts and to respire.

我们对他们的生态一无所知的事实确实令人兴奋。

Over time, the tower grows and becomes a mound that is colonized by other organisms that need well-drained soil to survive – this includes other species of earthworms, some plants, ants and termites. In the photo, we can see that some mounds are well-defined small round mounds of about 1 meter in diameter. We can also see in the center of the image that small mounds have coalesced/merged to form larger ones with a more labyrinth pattern. On the right of the photo we can barely see any mounds.

What about this scene particularly interested you?

这个场景很好地显示了，在几米的空间尺度上，土墩的形状和模式可能会改变。这些变化可能是由与地形相关的环境条件的小规模变化强调，因此在雨季的水位和洪水持续时间的深度。尽管我们尚不知道环境中的变化如何影响earth的丘陵行为，但这张照片为我们提供了建立假设的支持。