Researching ecosystem change in Amazonia and Africa
Fieldwork
To coincide with World Peatland’s Day, on Wednesday 2nd June, 2021, three members of the Tropical Wetlands Consortium, Lydia Cole, Katy Roucoux and Althea Davies, launched a new website, which will be showcasing an online exhibition from August onwards. Funded by a British Ecological Society Outreach Grant, they have developed an exhibition of photographs illustrating … Read more
Integration of high resolution imagery from UAVs for Mapping of Provisioning Ecosystem Services in the tropics Ximena Tagle provides a summary of her Ph.D. research topic I’m halfway of my Ph.D. research at the Laboratory of Geo-information Science and Remote Sensing at Wageningen University and Research (WUR), in collaboration with the Research Institute of the … Read more
Lydia Cole returns to tell a few tales of her recent stint of fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon, as part of the Leverhulme Trust-funded project: Valuing Intact Tropical Peatlands: an Interdisciplinary Challenge. In early December, I returned to a cold and dark Scotland after two months in a warm and sunny Peru. Although, after spending … Read more
Acabo de regresar de un viaje de campo a la cuenca baja y media del río Chambira. Si tuviera que poner una banda sonora a los recuerdos de mi viaje, sería sin duda triste y poco esperanzadora. La marginación y la pobreza real en la que viven las comunidades urarina de esta olvidada zona del … Read more
Lydia Cole describes her recent experiences of ‘walking’ through/being sucked into the peat swamps of the western Amazon. At the end of June, I got back from two months of fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon. The swamps, the Amazon, Peru, and indeed South America, were all new to me, having spent most of my research … Read more
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
In recent years, researchers at the University of St Andrews, their colleagues at the Peruvian Amazon Research Institute (IIAP), and others have highlighted the crucial role that the Amazon’s largest tropical peatlands, located in the Loreto Department of Peru, play for the global climate due to their role as a carbon store and sink. But … Read more
Freddie is returning to Peru for the second spell of fieldwork for his PhD project on the historical ecology of Peruvian peatlands.
Greta Dargie, Ian Lawson and Simon Lewis spent several weeks in the Republic of Congo searching for peatlands. Greta’s PhD research, in collaboration with WCS Congo, aims to make the first systematic study of peatlands in the Congo Basin, developing the same kinds of themes that our group has been working on in Peru. Recent … Read more
This summer saw the completion of our second round of fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon. Tom Kelly, Ian Lawson and Katy Roucoux spent three weeks in Loreto, continuing their work on the peat swamp at Quistococha and surveying the wetlands around Jenaro Herrera on the Rio Ucuyali. The majority of this work will form part … Read more