With the project RAPHIA, my PhD student, Suzanne Mogue, my Gabonese collaborator Raoul Niangadouma (Herbier National du Gabon), and myself went to Gabon and collected Raphia species. We drove from Yaoundé Cameroon, and crossed Gabon from North to South. The trip was a success with several new records for Gabon. The trip was between 11/11 and 30/11 2015.

From October 18th till October 31st 2015, Hervé Sauquet, Renske Onstein (post doc at the sauquetlab.org) and I undertook a wonderful field trip to Sabah, Borneo. For me it was my first steps in South East Asian rain forests, and what a show it was. We focused on collecting Magnoliales and especially Annonaceae.
Below are some pictures and a short video of our trip, Renske style.

In September 2015, I went on a collecting trip to the Republic of Congo. I visited my PhD student Carine Mampouya and Prof. Jean-Marie Moutsamboté. We visited the small mountain chain of the Matombe, 100 km from the Atlantic coast. I was a great trip in a wonderful country.

The ANR JCJC project AFRODYN is funded. This project will explore past dynamics and future resilience in tropical rain forests of Central Africa. It will start in 2016 and last 4 years.

In February 2015, my colleague Vincent Droissart, an orchid expert and I went on a collecting trip to the Campo Ma'an National park, in south Cameroon. The trip involved hicking into the park for a day, and then camping for several days. The trip was great, but hard, mainly because the guides were not that reliable. Several new species were collected; see here.