The details about snow

Misty

In former times, when people lived in a mystic world, where elves, dwarfs, leprechauns and talking wolves did their dreadful state of affairs in the midst of dark and impenetrable huge forests, people thought that even the old trees in the woods had their own thoughts.

Park Rehberge in Berlin

Uncontrollable, sounds, the snorting of the deer, a mysterious hidden, permanently changing shades in a cold and misty twilight.

Biology

A forest is only then a forest, when a high concentration of trees is given. Woods bear a great number of species, produce a majority of oxygen in our world; they are huge reservoirs of water and stabilize the ground with their tangles of roots.

Snow

Snow consists of ice crystals. Their formation within clouds depends on the presence of ice nucleating particles and temperatures lower – 12°C.

Crystals possess a hexagonal symmetry, being prism-shaped at lower temperatures and dendrite-shaped at higher temperatures.

Temperate deciduous forests hibernate without functional leaves. Most trees throw off all leaves already in autumn to be protected from desiccation in winter frost periods.

Layers of snow are excellent thermal conductors and additionally protect all life underneath from frost damages in the cold season.

Waiting for the spring time

Most life forms hibernate together with their leafless trees. Especially accumulations of deadwood contain remarkable numbers of species, such as insects, spiders, mites or nematodes. Some already begin under their snow cover to prepare themselves for the warmer season.

When all snow is gone, winter colors in red, yellow, brown and some green reappear. Early blossoming plants are already germinating.

Macro Life in urban Parks of Berlin

Berlin is a green city. Each district has several urban parks of different sizes. Besides Tiergarten and Tempelhofer Feld in the center and South of Berlin, the northern district Wedding has an unusually large park area, the „Rehberge“ (originally connected with Schillerpark and Goethepark), which is based on several sand dunes as relicts of the last glacial period. Before the responsible governmental institutions began in the 1920th to create a large city park with sports and nature sites, the sand hills were connected by extended swamps. Today the park, to which also the location Plötzensee is belonging, consists of a mosaic of different habitat types. A cut meadow area is made for people to rest or to practice sports of all kind. Adjacent lay forest areas with partly conifers mostly, wild growing (dry) meadows, sandy areas and wetlands (around ponds and lake Plötzensee).

my film about arthropod biodiversity in the first half of 2020, all copyrights Stefan F. Wirth

There is quite a remarkable biodiversity inhabiting this urban nature refuge. Besides aquatic organisms and birds, arthropods, gastropods, lichens, mosses and different taxa of flowering plants inhabit the „Rehberge“. I did not try for this video project to seek for very rare species. Instead I just intended to record some (more or less) common macro life examples. Main purpose was a camera move through the park focused on the unusual perspective to the tiny life forms. Species names are visible underneath in the corresponding video parts.

Copyrights Stefan F. Wirth, Berlin, Rehberge/ Plötzensee, May 2020