Our knowledge of the paleoenvironmental changes of Lake Victoria has grown over the past few years with the efforts of Researchers and PhDs involved in the Swiss SNF funded Sinergia Lake Victoria project and the Swedish Research Council funded ARCC project (Scaini et al 2024 Ambio). Both projects collected new sediment cores from Lake Victoria […]
New paper: Spatial variability of recent macroscopic charcoal deposition
Courtney Mustaphi, C.J., Davis, E.L., Perreault, J.T., Pisaric, M.F.J. 2015. Spatial variability of recent macroscopic charcoal deposition in a small montane lake and implications for reconstruction of watershed-scale fire regimes. Journal of Paleolimnology 54 (1): 71–86. DOI: 10.1007/s10933-015-9838-2 [Video summary]
Global Paleofire Working Group @Harvard Forest
The Paleofire: Data-Model Comparisons for the Past Millennium workshop was organized by the Global Paleofire Working Group (GPWG) Workshop and held at the Harvard Forest – http://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/ between September 29 and October 2, 2015. The Global Palaeofire Working Group (GPWG) oversees the Global Charcoal Dataset (GCD), was developed to facilitate research on fire in the Earth system. Our group provided the […]
LandCover6k: PAGES working group
Overview Adequate incorporation of land cover in global and regional climate models is still one of the major priorities in the climate modeling community. In particular, anthropogenic land cover change (ALCC) is still not successfully implemented in these models. As a result, climate modeling in paleo-mode or projection mode that tries to take ALCC into account is […]
KENYA FIELDWORK JAN-APRIL 2015 REAL-YORK TEAM
The 2nd field season for the York REAL team begun in February 2015 with visits and meetings at various institutions for possible collaboration and networking. Esther Githumbi met with the Kenya CIFOR team Mariana Rufino and Alphonse on the 16th of February at their ILRI office on their ongoing research in the Mau ecosystem to […]
Researchers study future of Kenya’s ‘last big mountain forest’ | CIFOR Forests News Blog
Researchers study future of Kenya’s ‘last big mountain forest’ | CIFOR Forests News Blog.
Palaeoenvironmental site map
Interactive map of palaeoenvironmental sites in East Africa. Click the sites to find the relevant published studies and access the papers. An index list of sites can be found by clicking the box at the top left corner of the map. version 001 Colin Courtney Mustaphi 15 December 2014 Sites and references Amani Pond Mumbi […]
Syn-depositional processes
One possible mechanism for the creation of fine-scaled laminations in sediments: [LINK]
Identification help: Freshwater bryozoa statoblast from East Africa
Identified! This is a statoblast of the species Lophopodella capensis or possibly Lophopodella stuhlmani. Some information on the distribution of this freshwater bryozoa can be found here. Bryozoa statoblasts like these were found in the late Holocene sediments of Nyabuiyabui Swamp, a freshwater swamp on the Mau Escarpment in Kenya, at 2900 m asl. If it is […]
Dr. Stephen M. Rucina
National Museums of Kenya – Earth Sciences Department – Palaeobotany and Palynology Section Dr. Rucina is a palynologist specialising in East African palaeoecology and is the head of the Palaeobotany and Palynology Section at the National Museums of Kenya, Nairobi. He completed a PhD at the University of York examining Late Quaternary palaeoenvironments of Mt. […]
ER 1: (Wild?)fire
Marie Curie ITN Experienced Researcher: Dr. Colin Courtney Mustaphi Host Institution: University of York Institute for Tropical Ecosystems (KITE), Environment Department Duration: November 2013 to November 2015 Summary: Fire is an important disturbance in East African ecosystems , influencing community structure and function, species distributions, nutrient processes, and plays a role in global carbon cycle. Humans have […]
Sieved charcoal analysis of sediments
LAB PROTOCOLS Wet sieved charcoal analysis By: Colin J. Courtney Mustaphi January 22, 2014; November 3, 2020 Sieved charcoal analysis can be performed at various depths down core to examine broad changes in macroscopic charcoal deposition or contiguously subsampled down core at a high resolution to reconstruct fire episodes and to estimate fire return intervals […]