We are a team of 6 students, half of us are studying Water Resource Engineering and the other half Resource and Waste Engineering within the Environmental Engineering Master at TU delft. We come from various backgrounds (civil, environmental and mechanical engineering) and countries (Netherlands, Italy, France, Iceland, Mexico). Our Multi-Disciplinary Project (MDP) will take place in the Limpopo Lipadi Game Reserve, in Botswana. This game reserve is a vast 20,000 ha reserve located near the South African border. The people on this reserve are interested in the durability of their activities so they can anticipate future challenges and preserve the local wildlife to the best of their abilities. The goal of the project is to increase understanding of the current availability of groundwater and the impact of different types of bush clearing methods on the water balance and the soils. We will be collaborating with the reserve's research team to conduct experiments in the field and analyse soil samples in a lab. We hope that the results of these tests will enable us to deliver a clear report to inform the reserve of the current state of their water balance, whether their current extraction rates are sustainable and which bush clearing method is best to maximise soil health and water retention capacity. Our plan is to start with an exploration phase, in which we increase our understanding of the site. After this, we enter the experimentation phase (teabag index, Mariotte's bottle, double ring infiltrometer test, slug test) to determine soil health and water infiltration characteristics of the top soil. Experimentation is followed by an analysis of our results to define the suggested strategy. Finally we will deliver a final presentation to the reserve's research team and create a poster to summarise our methods and findings to ensure that our work can be continued in the future.
Limpopo Lipadi Reserve Soil Research
