Researching ecosystem change in Amazonia and Africa
Ian Lawson As part of our ongoing research on understanding the distribution and dynamics of Peruvian peatlands, I spent part of July with a IIAP-St Andrews-Edinburgh team exploring the floodplain of the Rio Tapiche and its tributary, the Rio Blanco. The Tapiche is a right-bank tributary of the Ucayali, in the south of the Pastaza-Marañón Basin. It’s … Read more
We have extended the deadline for applications for a fully-funded PhD studentship working on the long-term ecology of Congolese peatlands at the University of St Andrews. is 18 January 2019, which fits in with other NERC DTP deadlines. The studentship is available to start on selected dates between May and October 2019. For further details … Read more
A new NERC-funded five-year project to study the peatlands of the central Congo basin has been announced. The project, led by Simon Lewis at the University of Leeds/UCL, involves a multidisciplinary team from the UK and the RoC. Dr Ian Lawson of the University of St Andrews is leading Work Package 1, which aims to … Read more
From April to July 2018 Greta Dargie, Jhon del Aguila Pasquel, Julio Iriarica and Ian Lawson have been busy in the swamp forests of the Pastaza-Marañón Basin setting up monitoring sites. At two key sites, at Nueva York and Veinte de Enero, we have installed a suite of equipment and initiated measurements aimed at measuring … Read more
Christopher, Nina, Katy and Ian spent an interesting few hours surrounded by post-it notes, thinking through how to ‘code’ (analyse) the 51 interview transcripts, amounting to something like 150,000 words, generated by our SFC-ODA project on valuing peatlands in Amazonian Peru. Many interesting themes emerged – not least the myths, legends and superstitions that surround … Read more
An article building on Tom Kelly’s PhD research at Lake Quistococha has appeared in The Conversation.
A new paper by Tom Kelly and other members of the Tropical Wetlands Consortium has just appeared in Journal of Quaternary Science. As part of his PhD work, Tom showed that the lake at Quistococha, on the outskirts of Iquitos in Peru, contains a remarkable pollen and microcharcoal record. The data show an increase in … Read more
During a project planning meeting in Iquitos Tim Baker, Ian Lawson, Santiago Rivas Perez and Euridice Honorio Coronado took the opportunity to present our recent work on Quistococha (Kelly et al. 2018) at the Ministry of Culture in Iquitos. We also appeared twice on local TV – a fun experience!
Freddie Draper and colleagues have a new paper in Ecography, online as an accepted article. The paper, Peatland forests are the least diverse tree communities documented in Amazonia, but contribute to high regional beta-diversity, uses floristic data from a network of plots to show that peatland palm swamps and pole forests host distinctive floras. Although, at … Read more
Our new NERC-funded project officially begins today, with the appointment of Dr Greta Dargie as a PDRA at St Andrews. Greta will be leading field and lab data collection, initially working with colleagues at IIAP in Iquitos. Greta has been in the news recently in relation to her pioneering work in mapping Congolese peatlands: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/12/congo-basin-swamps-peatlands-carbon-climate-change.