Field experience in Italy

I’m now back from Italy and have had a few of days to rest up, settle back into my home in Southampton and start preparing for the new term. Freshers’ Week is approaching and the start of term is not far away, so there are a lot of exciting things in the works!

However, I thought I’d dedicate this post to my field experience in Italy for my Biology course. So getting straight to it … on the 25th of August I left Southampton and took a coach to Stansted Airport, where I met up with one of my course mates (who had also chosen to do a field project in Italy). The flight to Turin, in the north of Italy, wasn’t until early the next morning, so my friend and I had arranged to stay at a hotel close to the airport. We chose this because it was easy to get to as well as being the cheapest accommodation we could find at the time of booking, so we felt quite lucky! That night we spent the evening using the pool and spa facilities while catching up on what we’ve been up to over the summer. We had to wake up at 3.30am to get ready to meet the project supervisor and other researchers going to Italy at the airport. We had planned to get an early night but ended up staying up the whole time - I guess we had a lot to catch up on!

So, without a wink of sleep, we made it to the airport and met up with everyone. The check in and flight went very smoothly, and once we arrived in Italy we picked up two hire cars and made our way to the hotel. During the drive we were able to talk more about the field site, our individual projects and the WATBIO project. The hotel we stayed at was really nice, both the hotel itself and the staff. I shared a large room with my coursemate and every day we’d come back to a clean and fresh room after completely messing it up in evenings with our dirty field clothes and shoes!

 Our hotel in Savigliano

We arrived at the hotel in the afternoon on our first day in Savigliano, so after we had lunch we had time to go to the field site to mark out the trees to make it easier for us later when we would begin collecting the data. This would also allow us to familiarise ourselves with the field site and layout.

We spent the next couple days collecting samples of leaves and taking images of them for one of the projects on leaf area and development, and then another few days measuring heights and diameters of the trees for the biomass data. In the end we had collected measurements on about 6,000 poplar trees! In between this work we also each had different tasks for collecting data for our individual projects. Mine included taking stomatal imprints, which I will be looking at under a microscope later. It was great to not only collect data for our own projects, but also be a part of a large collaboration project like WATBIO.

Above is a photo taken from the field site. You can see the poplar trees on either side of the path and then if you look closely you can see the Alps in the distance. This is the wonderful view we had from the field site during the days when the sky was clear blue.

Every evening we ate a very generous dinner at the hotel, consisting of a minimum of three courses - sometimes four! All in all, I had a great time and I particularly enjoyed experiencing what real field work is actually like, especially in an area of research which I’m genuinely interested in. It was also really good to talk to the researchers, and hear about how they got to where they are now and just to get a better insight into what a career in science and academia is like.

I loved the opportunity to carry out field work and research in Italy!

On our last whole day we were given the day off and got to explore Savigliano which was really nice because it would have been a shame to go somewhere new and not have a chance to actually explore the area.

A lovely lake we stopped by.

We left Italy on the 4th of September and again the journey back to Southampton went very smoothly. It was strange saying goodbye to everyone, as we all worked really well as a team (if I do say so myself!), but not to worry, I’ll be seeing them again soon.

Kristin