During the first two weeks of my trip, I'm exploring the seasonal wetlands ('vernal pools') in and around the Evo area. Over 40 sites have been inventoried by scientists from the Universities of Helsinki and Turku, based at the Lammi biological station.
In these particularly humid forest regions, after the snow melts and the first rains of spring, the micro-relief forms numerous pools of water whose levels can vary greatly over the course of the year, but also from one year to the next. The presence of water on these forest soils opens up the landscape and brings with it an explosion of life... plankton, large mammals, invertebrates, amphibians and avifauna. During the summer, these pools of water dry up, allowing a flora characteristic of these temporarily flooded environments to develop.
As part of the POOL project, a wide range of scientific monitoring is being carried out to study the evolution of this biodiversity and measure the importance of the role played by these wetlands in forest ecosystems.
I will soon be sharing with you some images of these 'vernal pools' and the flora and fauna I have observed there...
