Dear Friends and Family,
I'm writing this block to keep friends and Family up to date. I'm not a fan of group e-mails, especially if they come with several pages of text!!! Who reads these travel mass mails anyway?
So I decided to rather write a little blog with plenty pictures and little text. Only problem I don't have pictures yet but will get pictures from last week from others and the camera from Tenele very soon.
About a week ago I arrived in Skukuza, which is the little Staff/Researcher/Administration village of the Kruger National Park where I'm accommodated in a little tent in the researchers camp. I got a rental car for my fieldwork and came with equipment filling my bakkie (pick up) up to the roof.
Last week I was doing fieldwork with my two supervisors (Eddie and Prof Simon Lorentz) and a group of students from the university of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN). The follwoing week I'll be able to focus on my research sites which are the exclosures plots at the Sbie River.
For those who don't know yet, I'm monitoring different hydrological processes such as soil moisture, weather, xylem flux in trees (transpiration of trees), surface runoff, and soil properties in order to model hydrological processes in the hillslope during dry season (now) and wet season which will hopefully start in the end of October. The Exclosures plots is a long term experiment to examine the impact of herbivory and fire. So they basically installed a fence in 2002 at an hillslpe right next to the Sabie River which does not allow any animal into the full exclosure plot. The map above shows my research site next to the Sabie River. The red lines are the fences of the exclosures where the upper one is a partial exclosure fence and the lower the full exclosure fence (picture below). The partial exclosure fence only allows access to animals smaller than rhinoceros, so basically it keeps away elephants, giraffes and the larger rhinoceroses. The dotted lines are transects on which measurement instruments are installed.
The vegetations changes so far are already very distinct and hopefully the hydrology will reveal nice results too. I'm comparing these measurements and model runs with same measurements in an control areal with no fences just next to the exclosures.
Sorry for the dryness of this first entry but many pictures and more funny stories will follow very soon!!!
I'm sending best wishes to home and friends!!!
Hoi Hannes! Sounds very cool what you're doing and going to do there. Have fun and talk to you soon!
ReplyDeleteKnuffel, Vick
dude sounds really interesting guauuu, hope all keeps good, and i miss u ;( cheers
ReplyDeletewe want more!!!
ReplyDeleteHi Mate, nice to hear from you so quickly. And what a nice blog. Hope
ReplyDeleteyou are succeeding all you have to do in such wild game areas. Cu Tomi