Field mission in southern Morocco on Lavandula dentata and Argania spinosa. One thunderstorm, one drowned paper notebook, and PhytoNote saving the week.
I just got back from the field. Eight days in southern Morocco, between Tata and Akka, prospecting wild lavender Lavandula dentata and revisiting argan tree stations Argania spinosa that my colleague from INRA has been monitoring since 2019. My back remembers it. So do my notebooks.
I wanted to write this post before fatigue smoothed the details away. The details matter. When you come back, you tell the pretty story, the sunset over the palm grove, the goat in the argan tree. You forget that you measured radical scavenging activity at 10:47 pm, by headlamp, on a folding table that leaned.
Why Tata, why now
My colleague M. (I'm keeping him anonymous, he doesn't like seeing his name online) works at INRA-Marrakech on chemical diversity in marginal argan populations. I was looking for chemotypes of L. dentata in a zone where water stress pushes the plant toward more concentrated phenolic profiles. The Tata-Akka region brought both together: spontaneous argan stands on stony slopes, and patchy lavender carpets in dry wadis.
We left on the 9th, two vehicles, a solar camp, and a promise to our families to send an SMS each time we caught a signal. Spoiler: six texts in eight days.
What we brought
The big-ticket item was the portable Hach DR1900 spectrophotometer. UV/Vis, 340-800 nm range, lithium battery that lasts a full day of measurements if you kill the backlight between series. I bought it in 2024 on my lab budget at Mohammed V, with CNRST co-funding. The bill came to 60,000 dirham, roughly 6000 euros incl. tax, and that didn't include the hard transport case we had to add. For a Moroccan lab, that's a heavy line item. For the mission, it became the most precious object in the convoy, watched like an infant.
The rest fit into two coolers and one large plastic crate: sodium ascorbate for blanks, DPPH• powder kept cold (compressor cooler running off the solar panel), HPLC-grade methanol in an amber 2.5 L bottle, Eppendorf P200 and P1000 micropipettes, tips, clear 96-well plates, a compact bench vortex, and a small forced-convection dryer to fix freshly cut leaf samples quickly.
And our two notebooks. Mine, A5, blue cloth cover, elastic. M.'s, A4, spiral-bound, his preference because he sticks herbarium labels directly onto the pages.
A typical day
Up at 5:30 am. Harvest between 6 and 9 am, when the morning cool limits enzymatic oxidation of polyphenols. Three stations per day, never more. GPS georeferencing, station photo, 200 to 400 g of fresh material per individual, kraft paper bags for labelling (never plastic, it condenses).
Back at camp by 10 am, fast drying started. I had read several papers showing that beyond 2 hours after harvest, without temperature control, the matrix loses between 15 and 30 % of its apparent antioxidant activity. So the dryer ran at 38°C, forced ventilation, for 90 minutes. Not a true full drying. Just enough to stabilize and allow the evening extraction.
The DPPH test itself happened after sunset, when ground temperature dropped below 30°C. Extraction in 80% MeOH by 30 min stirred maceration, 0.45 µm filtration, serial dilutions, reading at 517 nm on the Hach. IC50 computed the next morning, cold, on my laptop, before we headed out again.
The night the notebook took the rain
On the sixth evening, we got a thunderstorm. A seasonal anomaly, short, brutal, twenty minutes of horizontal rain driven by the southeast wind. The lab tent held but a gust lifted one corner, and M.'s A4 notebook, left open on the table, took water straight across the page. The red ballpoint ink he uses for station codes ran. Three days of argan station records, illegible.
He didn't say much. He just stared at the page for a long time, then lit a cigarette he hadn't smoked in five years. I had a knot in my stomach because I knew we were talking about measurements we couldn't redo (the stations were 40 km behind us, no turning back).
Then I remembered. From day one, I had been entering everything in parallel on my phone, in PhytoNote, the Android app I built for my own bench work. Not out of distrust toward M. Out of habit. Harvest fingerprints, station codes, fresh masses weighed on the OHAUS 0.01 g balance, Hach readings, ambient temperatures, all of it went in. M. had dictated his own readings to me several times so I could log the exact measurement time, and I had entered them under his name in the app.
We pulled out the phone. No signal of course. PhytoNote runs local-first, data lives encrypted on the device, and cloud sync only happens once you return to coverage. I filtered by date and operator, and the three lost days were there. All of M.'s argan stations with my parallel notes. Not the freehand herbarium sketches he draws. But the numbers, yes.
He smiled. Not a big smile. Just the relief of a researcher who won't have to call his department head and explain that the rain ate his week.
The return, the sync, and the rest
We got back to Rabat on the 17th. I connected my phone to the lab wifi. Sync started on its own: 312 entries, 8 days, 0 loss. M.'s argan data flowed into his shared workspace in two minutes, clean JSON format, ready to be imported into his 2026 monitoring sheet.
For my own Lavandula dentata results, three chemotypes stand out clearly with IC50 values between 18 and 41 µg/mL on the DPPH test. For reference, ascorbic acid as a benchmark sits at 4.2 µg/mL in my hands. Southern dentate lavender will never match ascorbate. But the inter-population variability gap is wide enough to justify a follow-up LC-MS study we will launch in June with the UATRS-CNRST platform.
What I'm taking away
In the field, portable instrumentation changes the very nature of the data. A DPPH read 6 hours after harvest, in the south, at 30°C ambient, is not the same as a DPPH read 4 days later on a sample that travelled in an unventilated van back to Rabat. The Hach DR1900 is expensive for a Moroccan lab, but it makes those measurements defensible. The 38°C dryer doesn't replace freeze-drying, but it limits damage during the first 24 hours.
And bench-side digital capture, in the evening, by headlamp, on a phone that depends neither on the network nor on the camp wifi, has become non-negotiable for me. A paper notebook stays useful for sketches and free-form remarks. But for structured data, mass, dilution, absorbance, time, paper is a single point of failure that one thunderstorm is enough to exploit.
The deferred sync engine was sketched out in Tours during my joint thesis, hacking one YAML file per site — that switch is told here and feeds today's field camp scenario. The app source code is in the process of being opened (the first Zenodo release came out this month with a DOI).
Next mission: July, central High Atlas, on Thymus satureioides. This time we are bringing two notebooks AND two phones. M. has already asked me to install PhytoNote on his. What about you — how do you handle structured data when you're out in the field for days without wifi?