Publication about the remote sensing methodology

Hello all, 
Last year, Quinten Vanhellemont participated to the field MICROBIAN expedition in order to validate the measurements made by remote sensing and the temperature sensors placed in the field.
Thus, a paper on a first part of the remote sensing part of the MICROBIAN project has just been published online: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2019.111518

This paper describes the general method developed in MICROBIAN to derive surface temperatures from the Thermal InfraRed Sensor on board Landsat 8. In first instance, Quinten has validates the retrieval method using water temperature measurements in the Belgian coastal zone, to demonstrate that the general method works. Water is often used for this validation since it is generally homogeneous within one satellite pixel, and has a stable and well known emissivity. Indeed, the ratio of a material's emitted radiance to that of a perfect black body according to Planck's law.

The next steps are to establish emissivity for the imagery over the Sør Rondane mountains and perform the matchups with our iButton time series. Quinten is also working with the Royal Meteorological Institute to retrieve temperatures over their measurement sites across Belgium, and the UGent team working on Urban Heat Islands.

Happy reading!

A paper on 'microbial dark matter'

Dear all,
Our MICROBIAN colleagues at the University of Ghent, Sam Lambrechts, Anne Willems and Guillaume Tahon have just published a paper 'Uncovering the Uncultivated Majority in Antarctic Soils: Toward a Synergistic Approach' in Frontiers in Microbiology!
Link to Lambrechts et al. 2019

Indeed, the majority of bacteria is still uncultivated and known only from surveys based on sequence data, either a taxonomic molecular marker like the 16S rRNA gene or a metagenomic analysis where all the present genes are targeted (without preselection by PCR).

The paper is showing that cultivated strains are still crucial to study and understand microbial diversity and gives useful suggestions.

Cheers