Mansour Mdawar is from Lebanon. He studied agricultural engineering and has worked on projects for agricultural development in his home country and in Iraq. Now he found his way into science. He was able to come to Germany for the first time at the beginning of 2020 to begin his work as a doctoral student in the project
ClimCellMed under the direction of
Ingo Heinrich. But then the Covid-crisis hit and threw all work plans overboard. But Mansour Mdawar quickly found a way to use the forced laboratory-free time. He returned to his home country to systematically sample juniper trees. After the lockdown, the samples were prepared in the laboratory of
GFZ Potsdam. With high-resolution scanning technology, the cell structure and sizes as well as the diameter of the tree rings were examined. The data provide indications of seasonal or climatic events, temperature and humidity variations, which are not caused by winter and summer differences as in Central Europe. They will be essential for chronologically classifying juniper wood, which is an important historically used building material in for example
Yeha, Ethiopia.