44 minutes airport door to gate, SDQ

 Day 6 from hotel window. And finally, a work-related picture. The second photo here is a mahogany which exhibits characteristics of 2 different species, the local, native mahogany (Swietenia mahogani) and an introduced species, Honduran mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla). In general mahogany is a highly valued species for timber, and used in furniture, crafts, etc. The problem for farmers is that mahogany is slow growing and they can't turn a profit fast enough. Honduran mahogany is now preferred for planting because it grows faster but the trade off is that, while the quality of the wood is good, it is not as good as the native species. The tree in the photo is likely a hybrid of the two species and may therefore have good qualities of both, that is faster growth, but also higher wood quality. Turns out that in the tree world, there is lots of hybridization, or mixing of species, and in fact the boundary between species is not nearly as clear as once thought. The tree you see in the photo is in a plantation where the two species are planted in alternate rows, and over time we are hoping to collect seed and better understand the hybridization (mixing) process. Maybe even develop a seed source that combines the best characteristics of both species. But that is much further down the road.

Day 5

Day 3 and day 4 from my hotel window.

The view from my hotel room day 1 and day 2. Mostly the other things I might take photos of this week are people sitting in meetings, people hunched over documents, people, looking at slide presentations, people hunched over a different set of documents. So this may not be the last pictures you see from my hotel window.

21 minutes 37 seconds to gate at Pearson. This includes getting from the commuter parking lot to main building.

This week, among other things, we are doing a survey of crop yields. Understanding how much farmers are producing is a common practice worldwide but trickier to do among subsistence farmers. Reasons for this are many and one of the key reasons is because the typical subsistence farmer is growing a mix of many different crops in small batches. So while any single crop might do well or poorly, this might not give us a fair picture of whole farm performance.

This week we will try some strategies to try to paint that bigger picture, which I can talk about more later.