News

 

In order for everyone to be up to date and to experience exciting first results, there was the second big event of NamTip Master and PhD students.

 

Now that the experiment with all its exciting facets has finally been set up after great efforts, we were able to return this year to collect data. The great strength of the experiment "TipEx" unfolds through the long-term monitoring of numerous ecosystem components. Due to the removable roof parts, we can repeatedly take and analyze images with the drone during the entire vegetation period.

 

The year started off on a good note for the Namibian NamTip students as they participated in an intensive 2-weeks course on ecological statistics in R software. The training which took place in Windhoek was organized and facilitated by Dr. Mark Bilton, a Statistician by profession. It covered among others, an introduction to R; linear models: ANOVA, Regression, Post-hoc tests; Mapping species distributions, and Advanced graphics. In one of the students’ words, “The R course was really helpful in understanding not only how to use R software for data analysis but also the ecological statistics in general”. With the knowledge they acquired, the students are looking forward to exciting opportunities to present their research findings.

 

To explore decision making in rangelands, local farmers were invited to play the serious game "NamSed".  Farmers from the communal areas Ombooronde and Ozongarongombe managed their imaginary rangelands and were confronted with challenging events on their game board.

 

 

 

The current vegetation status in our study area: the woody layer is greening up, while the herbaceous layer is largely senescent.

One of our PhD students is looking at soil seed bank dynamics collecting soil seed bank samples that will be germinated in the greenhouse. Our near surface remote sensing PhD student is currently conducting dry season drone flights in the study area to obtain better Digital Terrain Models.

 

 

She has active support in this, because Ground truthing in observational plots along the transects after drone flights is essential.

 

The presence of living perennial grasses at our experimental site (TipEx) has to be recorded in both rainy and dry season to evaluate the recruitment.

 

 

Like last year, all NamTip scientists and some stakeholders gathered online for our annual meeting on September 27-28. Here we presented and discussed our initial findings, developed plans for the coming year of data collection, analysis and publication, and structured our ideas for the second phase of the NamTip project.

The tipping point experiment (TipEx) is now fully installed. Installation includes fencing off plots from the grazing area, installing rain shelters for drought simulations, installing soil barriers around plots, and installing soil sensors for continuous soil data collection. Full treatment can begin with the first rains in the upcoming 2021/2022 growing season!

After the successful fieldwork hundreds of data sheets need to be digitized. Everyone is working diligently and we are curious what our analyzes will yield!

 

 

 

Following up on the interview results from 2019 and the aerial image analysis we were able to interview the commercial farmers in greater detail. The interview results provide us with further information on land use change and rangeland degradation from their perspective.

Against all odds our international field team was able to complete the ecological assessments on all sites. Several data sets were collected and further insights on rangeland degradation during our analyses are yet to come.

 

 

 

 

Our experiment shall reveal the influence of biomass removal and drought on the herb layer. Before the second biomass clipping for the year 2021 on TipEx was conducted, data was collected.

 

 

 

The soil and vegetation team members from Namibia and Germany joined the remote sensing team and started their assessments. We started to take soil samples and plant trait samples, to do infiltration measurements, vegetation relevés and perennial grass assessments at the eight different sites consisting of four communal areas and four commercial farms.

 

It is still the beginning of the growing season and this dryland system has already received close to half of the rainfall that it gets in an entire period. Skies that are predominantly blue during this time are constantly covered with clouds, river channels that didn’t flow for years are now filled with water blocking car tracks and the rangelands are flushed with green.

 

 

A sign explaining our Tipping Point Experiment was installed at the Hamakari Farm.

 

 

Our social scientists Diego Menestrey Schwieger and Meed Mbidzo published their article "Socio-historical and structural factors linked to land degradation and desertification in Namibia's former Herero 'homelands' " in the Journal of Arid Environments.

 

 

 

 

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Due to the local and global exceptional situation the team had to leave the Greater Waterberg area much earlier than planned. The Namibian team members returned home, while the German team members had to leave Namibia.

 

 

Our international team of natural scientists returned to the chosen sites to do their various vegetation assessments.

 

The local German journal "Südzeit" published an article about the project written by the team members Lisa-Maricia Schwarz, Florian Männer, Katrin Zimmer, Alexandra Sandhage-Hofmann and Anja Linstädter (Südzeit 84: "Sand - schwindende Schönheit").

 

 

A big team of collaborators, social and natural scientists visited the Waterberg region. To enable our interdisciplinary study framework joint study sites needed to be selected.

 

The Tipping Point Experiment will be installed at the Hamakari Farm. Here will be a study area for the "healthy" site:

 

 

The NamTip team of stakeholders and scientists met in full numbers.