Research Outputs

Stephen Rucina (National Museums Nairobi) and Cassian Mumbi (TAWRI) are spending 6 months at the University of York as from May 2008 to work towards the completion of their PhDs on ‘Palaeoecology of the Eastern Arc Mountains’ and A comparison of forest dynamics in highland and lowland Kenya’ respectively.

Vanessa Gelorini, from the Limnology Unit, Department of Biology, Ghent University, Belgium visited the University of York in May/June to work on her PhD. PDF

Rob Marchant was been invited the LTC Spring Forum of Designing ‘Pro-Poor’ rewards for ecosystem service. The visit, funded by the World University Network, also explored avenues for closer collaboration with Dr Jack Williams who specializes in analysis of past vegetation dynamics in North America and Ecuador. PDF

Rob Marchant was invited to the lab group of Prof Walter Jetz in San Diego to give a presentation on the KITE project. Walter Jetz will be leading the modeling of bird and mammal distribution from the Amboseli National Park project and discussions will focus on ensuring compatibility between the approaches and ways to develop the project to integrate the analysis form birds, mammal and plants under changing climates within East Africa

Andy Marshall has joined KITE on new project mapping the distribution of plants in Amboseli National Park of Kenya and the borderlands of Tanzania. The project, funded by the Liz Claiborne Art Ortenberg Foundation, in collaboration with the The African Conservation Centre, the University of California at San Diego and Missouri Botanic Garden, is modelling the vulnerability of mammals, birds and plants to climate change. PDF, Photos

KITE is featured in the Global Land Project (GLP) newsletter. Rob Marchant, funded by the Royal Society, will give a presentation on the KITE project within the GLP session at the upcoming IGBP Open Science Congress in Cape Town.

Dr Dominic Bandaysu from Mbarara University, Uganda has been awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to spend 6 months within the University of York to work on an analysis of Non-Timber Forest product use from Bwindi-Impenetrable Forest National Park, Uganda.

Cosmas Mligo has started his PhD on ‘Vegetation community structure, composition and distribution pattern of the Coastal Forests of Tanzania’. The work is conducted at the Botany Department, University of Dar es Salaam and supported by the CEPF and WWF-Tanzania. The project is supervised by Herbert Lyaruu, Henry Ndangalasi and Rob Marchant.

Philip Omindi from the Climate Prediction Centre (Kenya Meteorological Office) is collaborating with KITE by running the regional climate model (PRECIS) with three different model boundary conditions (Hadley CM3, ECHAM and NCAR) for two different IPCC scenarios. Output will be used by Phil Platts to understand the impacts of future climate change on ecosystem distribution on the Eastern Arc Mountains. Results will feed into various collaborations with KITE interested on the impacts of climate change for ecosystem composition and distribution in East Africa.

Veronica Muiruri has submitted her MSc. thesis at the University of Bloemfontein on ‘Detecting environmental change and anthropogenic activities on the Laikipia Plateau, Kenya.

Eifon Jones has been working on a project to map and understand patterns of Non-Timber Forest product abstraction from the Eastern Arc Mountains of Tanzania with a particular focus on the Uluguru Mountains. The project has been carried out in conjunction with Dr Neil Burgess University of Cambridge and will contribute to the Valuing the Arc program.

The recently published TRAFFIC report into logging in Tanzania, co authored by Antje Ahrends is available to download here.

KITE has been endorsed as a project of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IBGP) Global Landcover Project (GLP); this will enable results from KITE research embedded with this important international effort. GLP is a joint research project for land systems for the IGBP and the International Human Dimensions Programme. The GLP represents the research framework for the coming decade designed to better integrate the understanding of the coupled human-environment systems to assess how human activities on land are affecting feedbacks to the earth system and the response of the human-environment system to global change.

Fieldwork, for the Kilimanjaro Project, funded by National Geographic, took place in early 2008 to abstract sediment cores from two swamps on Kilimanjaro. Work will provide an insight into past vegetation dynamics on the iconic mountain and feed into developing palaeoecological work from the Eastern Arc Montains and Amboseli. Rahab Kinyujuri (NMK), who has started a MSc program at the University of Cape Town, will use the sediments to develop a research project based around vegetation reconstruction using pollen and phytoliths. Cassian Mumbi (TAWIRI), supported through the International Federation for Science, will carry out an analysis of modern pollen samples along altitudinal transects on Kilimanjaro. Photos

Philip Platts was invited to contribute to the Biome Boundary Shift workshop in Yokohama, Japan. The meeting was held at the Japanese Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), and focussed on the ability of Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVMs) to describe mechanisms at work on the boundaries between the Earth’s major vegetation zones. Weaknesses in existing DGVMs were discussed, and some novel methods for describing key processes such as migration were developed. Regional case studies for benchmarking are to include Amazonia, the Arctic timberline, and East and South Africa. We thank DIVERSITAS for providing funding for this work.

Building on recent collaborations between Dr. Rob Marchant and a team of ocean scientists in Japan, Philip also visited the University of Tokyo to discuss the team’s research into Indian Ocean currents, and their impact on local climate in East Africa. A new project is due to start this year, aimed at incorporating land-surface feedbacks into the models.

Philip Platts attended the Valuing the Arc (VtA) workshop in Morogoro, Tanzania. VtA is a five-year initiative aiming to assess and sustain Tanzania’s natural capital. The meeting brought together a number of key stakeholders and scientists from local universities (UDSM and SUA), as well as representatives from Stanford University’s National Capital Project (NatCap).

Discussions fell into two broad categories: biodiversity mapping and conservation, and ecosystem services. The former covered topics such as the quality of biodiversity data, ecological processes and conservation costs. Examples of services modelled include timber and non-timber forest products, carbon storage and water provision. In each case, model inputs were refined and key topics/regions were prioritised for future research. This led to a number of short-term project proposals, as well as discussion regarding the long-term sustainability of the management tools under development. Funding for this meeting was provided by The Royal Society.

Rob Marchant visited the Centre for Climatic Research and Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin and Madison as part of the World Universities Network, to discuss possible research collaborations. Research at the University of Wisconsin and Madison, under the leadership of Prof Jack Williams, is specialising in the study of climate-driven vegetation dynamics, with extensive work on the responses of temperate ecosystems to late-Quaternary and 21st-century climate change. Research activities are highly complementary to the work KITE has been pursuing in the tropics.

Rob Marchant was invited to the last of the three sessions under the NERC-funded Climate Change Working Group that will be hosted by Dr. Frank van Veen, Imperial College. The NCES-style working group comprises six individual projects with the general theme of bringing together ecological and meteorological data to detect climatic drivers of ecological systems.

Until January 2008, Antje Ahrends is a guest of the Macroecology group at the University of Copenhagen, working with Carsten Rahbek. Antje will be working on the impact of sampling artefacts on predictions of species richness and levels of endemism.

Rob Marchant was invited to participate in a workshop to assess threatened species vulnerability to climate change, hosted jointly by Imperial College London, IUCN Species Programme and IUCN Species Survival Commission and the Zoological Society of London. The workshop was an important early step in a new project to identify future threats to various species by considering emerging threatening processes and the biological vulnerability of species to them. The project will focus on the IUNC Red listed species to (i) identify species which are most vulnerable to the various threatening processes; and (ii) develop a strategy for including this information in assessments of the current conservation status of species to better inform conservation assessments and management decisions. For more information contact Wendy Foden, Species Programme, IUCN (wendy.foden@iucn.org) and Ben Collen, Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London (ben.collen@ioz.ac.uk).

September 2007

Rob Marchant was invited to a scenarios workshop of the Valuing the Arc Programme. The program, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, aims to describe, quantify, map and put economic values on the ecological services (water flow, carbon, biodiversity, ecotourism, etc) flowing from the Eastern Arc Mountains. This programme is a collaboration between five different universities in the UK, The University of Dar es Salaam and Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania and the WWF network in the form of WWF Tanzania Programme Office and WWF USA – Conservation Science Programme.

Alistair Jump was invited to give a seminar on the integration of genetic and ecological data in climate change research in the Ecology and Ecosystem Management seminar series of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich.

September also saw the Mid-term review for the KITE programme with the EC project officer (Sevda Alandrova) and an external scientific advisor (Prof Patrick Holligan) visiting York for a day of presentations, group and individual discussions. The day was a great success and was an enjoyable event for all involved.

August 2007

Rob Marchant attended Meetings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Discussion with David Western of the African Conservation Fund led to a new research proposal. In conjunction with Missouri Botanical Gardens, we plan to investigate climate change impacts on the Amboseli National Park ecosystem, in particular mammal, plant and bird populations, and relationships to associated cross boarder protected areas in Tanzania under future climate change scenarios.

The Kite team spent July and August conducting fieldwork in the Eastern Arc Mountains. Activity included the extraction of sediment cores from high altitude wetlands, tropical forest tree community surveys, collection of leaf samples for genetic analysis and ground-truthing presence/absence records for tree species distribution modelling.

Rob Marchant was invited to give a presentation entitled Afromontane ecosystem stability or change? Combining methodologies from a biodiverse area (Marchant, R., Ahrends, A. Finch, J., Jump, A., Lovett, J., McClean, C., Mumbi C., Platts P. and Rucina, S) at the Global Change Research Network in African Mountains workshop in Kampala, Uganda from 23-25 July 2007. The workshop brought together 70 scientists working on African mountain ranges. MRI, Makarere University, the Global Mountain Project, and the Swiss Centre for Development and Environment are now coordinating the emerging network and developing a suite of research projects around research on African Mountains. For more information on the MRI go to http://mri.scnatweb.ch/content/category/3/61/80/

National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration has awarded a grant to support a project entitled "Kilimanjaro and Mount Meru: Mountain ecosystems under change. The project will form the basis of a research degree, based in the Botany Department University of Cape Town, for Rahab Kinyanjui from the National Museums of Kenya. This award will enable KITE researchers, and colleagues from TAWIRI, National Museums of Kenya and University of Dar es Salaam to abstract, date and analyses sediment cores from lakes and bogs on two iconic mountains in Tanzania.

NSF-START has awarded a grant to Stephen Rucina Mathia of the National Museums of Kenya to fund the remaining two years of his PhD reseaerch project on the palaeoecological of Kenyan highlands and lowlands. The grant will enable Stephen to spend several months at the University of York and Amsterdam.

Jemma Finch attended the inaugural meeting of the East African Quaternary Research Society (EAQUA) in Kampala, Uganda, where her preliminary results from the Uluguru Mountains pollen record were presented as a poster. This workshop provided the opportunity to meet and discuss palaeoecological research in East Africa, while facilitating ongoing collaborations with the British Institute in East Africa (BIEA) and the Historical Ecologies of East African Landscapes (HEEAL, directed by Paul Lane).

In early June, Jemma Finch travelled to Nairobi for a week in order to spend time with Stephen Rucina Mathai and colleagues at the National Museums of Kenya (NMK) Palynology Laboratory. Here, she was able to take advantage of the excellent pollen reference collection, pollen atlas literature and the vast experience of pollen analysts working there. Jemma was also able to meet with researchers from Nature Kenya and take a tour around the Palaeontology Department. Whilst in Nairobi, Jemma also visited the BIEA, where she was able to make use of their extensive library containing an unmatched selection of archaeological and historical literature for East Africa.

Jemma Finch was selected to attend the EPD - Open Scientific Meeting of the European Pollen Database, 8-12 May, 2007, Europôle Méditerranéen de l’Arbois, Aix-en-Provence, France. She received financial assistance from the meeting sponsors (European Science Foundation EuroCLIMATE programme and EU FP6 Network of Excellence EVOLTREE). Jemma extended her stay to work through pollen identifications with Annie Vincens at CEREGE

Antje Ahrends was selected to attend the Tropical Botany course at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew 8th -18th May

Antje Ahrends and Rob Marchant worked within the UK-PoPNet working group on climate change and biodiversity, Exeter, April 16th - 20th.

Rob Marchant attended the People Land and Time (PLANTINA) meeting in Stockholm, April 24th - 28th.

Phil Platts was awarded first prize by the World Universities Network Global GISc Academy for his seminar in the graduate student
‘e-seminar’ series. Further details and the seminar slides can be found at: http://www.wun.ac.uk/ggisa/seminars/archive/2007_program/index.html

Rob Marchant was invited by the Royal Society as part of a UK delegation to take part in discussions leading towards establishing support for UK – Ghana/Tanzania collaborative research opportunities and capacity building. Following the joint science academies’ G8 statement on Science & Technology for African Development, the Royal Society agreed to extend its regional focus from South Africa to Ghana & Tanzania. As part of a wider effort to establish a working relationship with the Science Academies of both countries, the Society is currently planning to implement a special collaborative funding scheme for research project, undertaken between UK-based researchers and scientists based in Ghana/Tanzania available from 2007/08. A meeting took place in Dar es Salaam as part of an extensive consultation to capture the relevant information necessary to establish an appropriate funding mechanism, designed to meet the needs of the science communities in Ghana and Tanzania.

Antje Ahrends and Rob Marchant were invited members of a NERC working group focusing o

n impacts of Climate Change on Biodiversity. The first of three meetings for the group took place at Silwood Park under the leadership of Frank van Veen and brought together climate scientists from the Met Office and some 15 academics from UK, The Netherlands and Spain with interest on impacts of climate change on population dynamics and ecosystem structure. Six related projects were identified and initial analysis carried out that will lead to additional investigation and publication.

Jemma Finch and and Rob Marchant have been awarded a NERC Isotope Geosciences F acility Grant in conjunction with Melanie Leng of the British Geological Survey. This will enable a high resolution carbon isotope analysis on the Deva-Deva record to be conducted. The analysis will be supported by a compound specific analysis of modern plant samples from the site to establish basin to sediment relationships. This analysis will allow for the detection of changes in the relative composition of C3 and C4 plants through time, offering a complimentary source of information to the pollen signal.

Rob Marchant was support by the Royal Society to visit Prof Toshio Yamagata (JAMSTEC and University of Tokyo) and Dr Tozuka Tomoki (University of Tokyo) to develop research collaboration. Prof Yamagata is particularly interested in the characterisation and evolution of the Indian Ocean Dipole and impacts on adjacent land masses. The collaboration will further develop with the support of an award from the Daiwa Foundation with a longer term view to investigate land-ocean feedbacks between East African ecosystem dynamics and the Indian Ocean circulation.