Greetings from Limpopo-Lipadi, Botswana! We have now experienced three wonderful weeks at the reserve, with an abundance of soil and water, African bushes and extraordinary wildlife.
The bulk of these three weeks have been dedicated to field work. After a meeting with the research manager of the reserve, Botilo Tshimologo, it was decided that experiments should be performed at four sites (Southern plains, Northern Plains, Phofu Drive, and Middle plains) with a total of 6 locations at each site.
A total of 96 teabags have been buried at each site and location, double ring infiltrometer and slug tests conducted at 6 locations and 60 soil samples excavated for further analysis. This was possible thanks to Students4Sustainability who funded a part of this project and allowed us to visit these four different sites at the reserve!
A special thanks to Felix, a member of the Anti-Poaching Unit, who has accompanied us every day to the chosen sites to perform our field work experiments. He has given us great insight into the vegetation growing at our chosen locations and helped us greatly during field work.
Unfortunately, we were notified when we arrived that using the lab at Botswana International University of Science and Technology (BIUST) would not be possible. But this did not stop us from performing the necessary tests to analyze our samples, we have set up an at-home laboratory, with a Mariottes bottle and safe-guarded air-drying installation for the soil samples.
We are looking forward to the rest of our stay here at the reserve. Botswana’s Independence Day is approaching on the 30th of September, where we will participate in several fun activities in teams! With a couple of days left of fieldwork, we are ready to analyse our samples and collected data to get some meaningful results for the reserve.
UPDATE I: Limpopo Lipaldi Reserve Soil Research
