I spent the past week volunteering in the #AltaMurgia National Park, a @unesco.org site in Italy, monitoring pollinators (bees and butterflies), as part of the project #Parchigiani "la resistenza della biodiversità". A rewarding way to support biodiversity research 🐝🦋🌳🌸

In the forest, a few wild honey bee nests can be found. These understudied natural colonies are vital to understand pollinator resilience in semi-natural habitats, especially now that #wildhoneybees have been declared endangered in Europe by the #IUCN

Mercadante Forest is one of the few green hearts of the Park, a manmade pine forest creted in the early 1900s to protect nearby towns from floods and erosion.

@christina-hn.bsky.social gave insights into tree growth, the role of water supply, and how we measure it - from traditional approaches to high-resolution sensors.

@rschwutke.bsky.social took participants into the canopy to measure stomatal conductance (=how much water exits leaves through stomata). Trees limit water loss by regulating their stomata - some tree species are more conservative with their water and close their stomata earlier than others