News
November 2021
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.
October 2021
Dry season fieldwork
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.
September 2021
The big meeting
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.
July 2021
TipEx Intallation done!
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!
Data, data, and even more data
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!
May 2021
Exploring the commercial farms' land use history
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.
Successful completion of the main field campaign 2021
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.
March 2021
Revisiting the Tipping Point Experiment (TipEx)
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.
February 2021
Reunited
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.
January 2021
In need of a rubber boat
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.
November 2020
Annual assembly of the NamTip scientists and stakeholders
Due to the ongoing limitations caused by the pandemic the assembly took place online. Our team presented the development and progress within the respective studies and discussed the way ahead.
October 2020
Introducing the TipEx sign
A sign explaining our Tipping Point Experiment was installed at the Hamakari Farm.
July 2020
The first NamTip publication is here!
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.
May 2020
Trying to save some data
The Namibian ecologists returned to the field to collect some data in the context of a shortened protocol. Since ecological fieldwork depends on the vegetation period, most fieldwork ends when the dry season arrives.
April 2020
NamTip species observations on iNaturalist
Plant species observations from our ecology team can now be found on the platform iNaturalist, which also supports the scientific data collection of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).
March 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic stops fieldwork
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.
The first large ecological field campaign started
Our international team of natural scientists returned to the chosen sites to do their various vegetation assessments.
When the sand arrives
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").
October 2019
First field visit - Preparations, site selections and lots of sand
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:
September 2019
Kickoff and Stakeholder workshop in Windhoek (16 - 17 September)
The NamTip team of stakeholders and scientists met in full numbers.
August 2019
An interview with PD Dr. Anja Linstädter on tipping points in ecosystems of Namibia was published in Süddeutsche Zeitung (a daily German newspaper).
→ Link
July 2019
The news magazine of the University of Bonn ("Forsch") published an article about the NamTip project in its Summer 2019 issue:
source: https://uni-bn.de/Mv0ji7A6ie
