Karen and Markus are world travellers and avid adventurers.  For the second leg of their trip, they are bicycling through Europe and recording roadkill observations for theASC Roadkill Survey for Road Bikers.  For more on their trip, visit their website http://2enroute.blogspot.com/.

There are many reasons the average person might stop and stare at Markus and I as we go about daily life on this trip. It might be because we are pushing fully loaded bikes up flights of stairs in a crowded train station. It could be the impossible-to-ignore fluorescent orange biking vests. Or it might be because we are standing in the middle of a road photographing squashed toads.

Grant Adams is passionate about making a difference. He is currently living and working in Ulcumayo, Peru as a Peace Corps Volunteer focusing on environmental management. While his work includes projects in everything from reforestation to tourism, much of it is focused around education in basic conservation and pollution reduction. As if this were not enough, Grant is also working with ASC and the Pacific Biodiversity Institute to collect data from the remote areas around the town in which he lives. The information he gathers and sends back will help to form a clearer picture of this region and the species at risk within it.

The Pacific Biodiversity Institute is making strides to collect as much data as possible in South America in order to identify areas that are at high risk for biodiversity loss. By exploring South America’s wild places, recording biodiversity, and determining the impacts of humans on various ecosystems, the organization is forming a more coherent image of these environments. With more information about wild areas, the Pacific Biodiversity Institute is able to identify how and where conservation efforts should be focused. This requires many partnerships stretching from the local level to a global scale, a great deal of coordination, and of course – volunteers like Grant.

Hari Mix is a PhD Candidate at Stanford University and is climbing in the Himalaya as part of a team of researchers, TripleED, who are studying decision making in high altitude environments.  Hari is collecting snow samples and lichen for two ASC projects while attempting  to summit Mt. Everest and East Lobuche. 

Hari writes:

One interesting twist in my climb was that I’ve continued to work with Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation to do some climate science projects on these trips. As long as I’m a scientist and heading to these wild places, the least I can do is help some of my peers who need data. Just below the summit of Lobuche East yesterday, I rappelled off the lip of a crevasse to get some snow and ice samples for Natalie Kehrwald, who’s work focuses on the thinning of Himalayan glaciers due to climate change and the role of dust and other particles in accelerating the melting. A huge thanks to Chris Klinke, our expedition leader, who helped me set up our anchor system, and Markus Hallgren, the head of our TripleED research project on how teams are organized. Markus let me take the time off from my main research duties to pull this off. I’ll continue doing some science projects on Everest. I hope to collect the highest plant life ever and also create an altitude transect of smaller snow samples as high as I can. I’ll just say that carrying 15 1L Nalgene bottles up to 20,000ft was plenty hard!

Take care,
Hari

To follow Hari's expedition, learn more about his research, or see more beautiful photos please visit his blog www.hmix.org.  

Laura K.O. Smith recently returned from sailing the Antarctic Peninsula while collecting data for two ASC studies on whale and penguin behavior. Sailing on Quijote, a 40-foot sailboat designed and crafted by her husband, Federico Guerrero, the crew departed January 27 from Ushuaia, the capital of Tierra del Fuego, commonly regarded as the southernmost city in the world. 

Guerrero began building Quijote in 2008, and launched her maiden voyage in 2011. Guerrero and Smith had always dreamed of sailing the Antarctic Peninsula, and Quijote was built with that rigorous expedition in mind. Smith said the vessel did well on the journey that began with Deception Island and continued south through the Argentine Islands to Vernadsky Station, crossing the infamous Drake Passage twice and carefully meandering through seemingly endless ice fields.