Over The Horizon

Behind the Wall Science

Demolition of the Berlin Wall has opened up new scientific information for scientists all over the world, according to Landcare Research scientist Dr Aroon Parshotam, who has recently returned from Europe.

Parshotam says his visit to Bad Lauchstadt in the former East Germany was the highlight of his trip. The area is the site of some of the oldest land and soil experiments in Europe, dating back about 90 years and hidden behind the Wall for several decades. A large amount of very valuable data has been collected there.

"They were fascinated that someone from New Zealand would visit their soil institute, and very few other scientists had visited them before, particularly from the West. Few are aware of their work and little is published because of the language barrier. They have so much collected data. It made me realise that in the West we are playing a lot of computer games, developing models without data. In East Germany they have been collecting real information which is now open to the rest of the world, with few computer facilities."

Parshotam says although he and his German colleagues could not speak the same language, they were able to communicate through mathematics, using symbols rather than words. The work being done in Germany and New Zealand on climate change in relation to soils and land systems is similar in many aspects, and no other groups appear to be looking at this area in the same way.

He says East Germans and Russians have some land experiment sites going back hundreds of years, using data collected and recorded by monasteries. The information now becoming available will be very useful throughout the world, because they have been very thorough in detailing experiments involving hundreds of crops.