Onward and upward

The past week has mainly been focused around another main component of this course – Faculty Field Projects. Throughout the course of the semester, we will complete 7 of these FFP’s. Scientists from all over the country come and spend a few days with us, while we work on a project with them. Each person is assigned to a group for a specific project for which they are responsible for organizing equipment and ultimately writing up the report. Everyone works on gathering data for all of the projects though. It’s an interesting way to be exposed to a wide range of topics and meet scientists other than our standard professors.

This week we did our first two FFP’s. The first one dealt with the dynamics between grass and trees and trying to use this relationship to create fire management plans. Wildfires burn differently based on the composition of the landscape. When there are a lot of trees, fires tend not to burn. This project involved measuring grasses and trees in different locations and looking for signs of fire. I wasn’t assigned to write up this report, so I don’t know the exact findings but the concept seemed interesting. The other FFP this week involved looking at how marula seeds are dispersed. Marula trees are very common here and produce a very sweet fruit. The fruit can be eaten raw, or it is often fermented to make marula beer. Marula seeds are a popular food for elephants, which is a main way that the seeds are dispersed. Squirrels also eat the seeds and sometimes hoard them in large bunches. The project we worked on dealt with determining how both elephants and squirrels play a role in dispersing the seeds. A large number of seeds were marked with magnets and fluorescent powder and set out to see how far squirrels can carry them to hoard them. We will have to wait a few months to go back and see the results of this part of the experiment. To determine the impact of elephants, we measured how far marula seedlings were found from the parent plant. We also collected elephant dung to see how many marula seeds the elephants had ingested. We only worked on these projects with the visiting scientists for about three days, but even in this short amount of time I was able to learn a lot.

                It’s hard to believe it, but we are already moving on from Skukuza after spending a little over two weeks here. We’ll be back here once again in the beginning of April to do more fieldwork. It will be nice to come back to some place that we have already experienced. Tomorrow morning we are driving north to Hamakuya where we will spend a few days in homestays, and a few days in the classroom. From there we will be traveling to Mapungubwe which is near the Northern border of South Africa. These two places don’t have internet access, so I will be internet-less for about two weeks. Hopefully I’ll have some good stories to share the next time I’m online though.