After the extremely rainy expedition last summer, a winter jacket and thick woolly socks were at the top of my packing list this time. With the memories of soaking wet days on the last expedition to Canada, I was convinced that I now knew what to pack. Small spoiler: It hardly rained at all! My winter jacket stayed in my rucksack and my urban nature knowledge was proven wrong with a twinkle in my eye.

Months in advance, we had already developed a detailed monitoring plan for our expedition, which specified how we would collect data in the protected areas.

We start with the " rapid assessment" of all new areas. This involves determining the area's "worthiness of protection". Decisive factors include biodiversity, CO₂ storage capacity, geographical location and acute threat.

After purchasing the land, we draw up a "basic inventory", i.e. an initial list of the animal and plant species that we find there.

This list serves as the starting point for the subsequent long-term monitoring, which we use to document changes in biodiversity and ecosystems over a period of years.

The icing on the cake is the "special research projects", which get to the bottom of more specific scientific research questions. We record all of this data to make the value of wilderness more tangible and to measure and communicate the concrete impact of our actions on the basis of data. 

To put this plan into practice, we spent two weeks on eight different pieces of land in British Columbia. It was particularly impressive for me to accompany the two peatland researchers Prof. Dr. Jürgen Kreyling and his doctoral student Hanna Martens from the Greifswald Mire Center in their work. Their aim was to find out more about the carbon stores of the moors in our protected areas, as these have so far been virtually unexplored - apart from rough estimates. 

Bogs form naturally when the water inflow exceeds the outflow. They are therefore usually found in hollows or valleys. Not so on Porcher Island! It rains so much here that bogs even form on hilltops and slopes - and from there you can look directly out over the ocean. Jürgen, who has been able to explore the world's moors on various excursions, was thrilled by this fact and said that he had never explored a moor with such a stunning view. Jürgen and Hanna were so inspired that they could hardly wait to publish their findings and started writing their publication on the spot. They are already convinced that the often underestimated moorland ecosystem will gain a whole new appreciation thanks to their findings!

Chris Ketola, Head Field Research Coordinator at WI, also trudged through dense, rough terrain and crawled through the undergrowth every day to deploy new camera traps and bat sensors and compile species inventories. He was often accompanied by Michael Zhang, a biology student from Canada and scholarship holder of the Bamfield Marine Science Center. Tom and Kai Andersch used drones and on-site assessments to map the intactness, biodiversity and carbon storage of new areas. I myself was not only responsible for setting up the malaise traps - tent traps for catching flying insects - in order to record even the smallest creatures in our protected areas.

In addition to the scientific work, I coordinated the expedition planning, camp organization and data management together with our Cooperation and Special Project Manager Chris Hoffmann and my Canadian colleague Marco Lou - from the daily schedule to the logistical coordination of our equipment so that all teams could work efficiently. I also found the collaboration with long-standing partners such as Dominik Günther from DIAMIR Erlebnisreisen and new partners such as Angélique Vacher from Caudalie particularly enriching. Both were in the conservation area to get an idea of the impact of their donations and to understand our projects even better. At the same time, they actively lent a hand - whether it was carrying heavy equipment through the dense forest or cooking in the camp kitchen with great motivation.

In the end, we all agreed that this expedition was a complete success for research. We returned with a wealth of data, are now carefully analyzing it and can't wait to share the results with you.

But in addition to the data (and my unused winter jacket), I am taking something back to Germany with me that is difficult to put into words. Memories of a very special place on earth that is so beautiful that I am lost for words. It's not the individual animal encounters (and there really were a lot of them!), it's not the gigantic jungle giants (and there really were a lot of those too!), and it's not the calming silence of the moor - it's this connection that I was able to feel in every moment on Porcher, no matter how small. The golden rays of sunlight breaking through a moss-covered branch. The clear air that fills your lungs with freedom. The shell glistening mysteriously in the middle of the forest. I felt it in all the snapshots: the deep connection between me and every tiny piece of the ecosystem puzzle.

In those moments on the expedition, I promised myself that I would do everything I could to at least try to capture this feeling with all the scientific data, images and videos and to bring it back to others and make it tangible. Because I think this feeling is exactly why we are on this earth: to feel the beauty of the world and let it touch our hearts. If I could wish for anything, it would be that everyone could experience this amazement for themselves, both today and in the very distant future. This is what we do on expeditions and every other day of the year to contribute to our understanding of nature. Because we only love what we understand, and we only protect what we love.