 We're in Birbac National Park at the moment. We're just in the swamp forest We've walked along the boardwalk into the forest So the peat is pretty deep here. I think it's five meters. So as You go into the forest the peat starts to dome forms a natural dome here, so Here we've got quite a lot of peat. It's good deep peat here Here we have here. We have the peat. It's essentially Organic matter that hasn't been able to decompose because here we can see the water table is so high Now oxygen can't get in so basically that means that this organic matter builds up builds up it becomes Let's say super concentrated. It holds so so much carbon. What we want to know is what happens if we drain this peat Take it out of its natural context. What's what's going on? So for me, I'm looking at methane and nitrous oxide now methane It holds 300 times more heat than than carbon dioxide so we need to find out what processes are happening to create these these fluxes and My other plot is a palm oil plot. Now initially the palm oil plot would have been this It was it's on peat on deep peat the same and it's been deforested now to grow a palm oil They've had to drain the peat Now I want to understand if this process is affecting production of Nitrous oxide and methane and when you change a habitat different animals moving different, you know You get a different whole different biodiversity So I want to know how this how this affects gas flux. So here. This is this is my baseline. This is this is the original let's say Nitrous oxide is basically composed of nitrogen, but They apply fertilizer in palm oil now you take you take away You take away all the water you apply more nitrogen now is This a reason that more greenhouse gases can be given off from palm oil This is one of my sample plots. I'm just putting on the hood Now what that's doing is over half an hour In half an hour the gases from the peat are going to accumulate inside here. So every ten minutes. I'm going to take Samples from this plot. So I'm attaching the vial This vial is actually vacuumed. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to create a vacuum inside this bit because it's full of air and then take samples now at the moment It's just atmospheric The atmospheric sample So make sure we're all closed On my barometer. I can check if I have Evacuated it Yeah, I have so I'm going to let some of the chamber gas in Just draw some out now. This basically flushes through the tubes. So if I do take any sample, it's there now I'm going to re-evacuate My tubes so I create a vacuum which draws the gas into my vial so now I Open this I Open this Release the gas into the vial. I close this now. I close my vial And that's my first sample taken I will come back in 10 minutes and do exactly the same again up until half an hour Um, this this gas sample now It will be put through um a GC in our lab at Jambi now what that's going to measure is methane and nitrous oxide The concentrations in the air parts per million and also from that we can work out How much gas is emitted Per meter squared and then we can scale it up to hectares as well This is really good because then with a given area We can take averages from this data and we'll also match it to um Data that's already being collected and we can we can see if we can see compare Contrast see what's going on and try to look at what's going on in the uh in the peat So here we've got um a piezo Now what this is is basically a two meter pipe that's driven into the ground Now the water table inside will be able to measure how high it is This is important because I want to find out how the water table level affects The gas fluxes So we're just in um The older palm oil uh plantation. We're heading to the seaford plot We're now in seaford's little research plot Um in the palm oil plantations at smp near jambi the palms here Are seven years old now. They're just coming up to seven years old Um, they're on peat So what we've got here is um, we've got about three or four rows of these palms Um, and each of us has got a different a different, um research schedule set up Um large scale this palm this palm oil plantation is is vast Um the area of peat that it's on is vast now if this process Scaled up is happening. Um across the tropics You know on a global scale. This is actually going to have a really big impact on global warming