By Aditya Acharya

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After 17 hours of journey by train we arrived in Vienna at around 8:30 am in the morning. Our professor Dr. Harald Vacik and Dr. Franz Holzleitner, and now our new Austrian friends Anna Schrötter and Markus Tonner welcomed us, and we set off directly to the field as there was sufficient space in buses for our luggage as well.

On the way we saw Black pine plantations, some mixed forest of Norway spruce and European Larch and some Norway spruce dominated forests. We saw breathtaking views of the alpine grasslands and the mountains, the Austrian Alps.

The Austrian Alps are also called Eastern Alps as these are the Eastern parts of the whole Alps range that extend across eight Alpine Countries: France, Switzerland, Italy, Monaco, Liechtenstein, Austria, Germany and Slovenia. Unlike in the Carpathians where snow is temporary, there is permanent snow cover in the Alps and hence there are glaciers, and they also serve as a permanent source of drinking water for many parts of Austria.

Following the schedule of the day, we went to see the steep terrain forest harvesting technology in one of the forests, the largest private forest of Austria, at Mayr-Melnhof.

Watch the technology/process below. 🙂

After that, on the way, we bought some stuffs for lunch for tomorrow and climbed up towards …