By Rafael Rosas (’20)
After learning about the different kinds of conservation areas, we moved on to the culminating experience of the program. We traveled to Gobabeb Research and Training Center, in the middle of the Namib Desert right where the gravel planes end, and the San Sea begins (and where Mad Max: Fury Road was filmed).
While at Gobabeb, we camped in the dry riverbed of the seasonal Kuiseb river and were divided into groups of our choice to do research of our choice with a Gobabeb staff member as our mentor for the research project design, execution and analysis. Our project was a pilot study aimed at creating a preliminary understanding of !nara health and distribution. !Nara is the only plant that can regularly and consistently grow in the inter dune sand sea, an area of the hyper arid Namib Desert that averages >25 mm of rainfall per year.
The famous Sand Dunes of the sand sea within the hyper-arid Namib Desert, where we studied !nara population health and distribution.
!Nara is of the same plant family as cucumbers and pumpkins, and like it’s relatives, produces a very watery, and edible fruit that is vital for the survival of both the wildlife and the human populations of the area. Since the !nara plant is only known to grow in northern South Africa, Namibia, and southern Angola (with the largest concentrated population being in the Lower Kuiseb), it has also become economically significant for the people who depend on it, as the seeds are baked and sold as a snack and its oils are used to make high-end health products.
Some of the metrics we used to determine overall population health were average !nara height and diameter, which we are measuring for one !nara mound here.
I know life as a Dartmouth student is always stressful and fast-paced, but our time at Gobabeb seemed especially so. We had nine days to create our groups, choose a topic, design our project, and collect data through field work. Then we had four days to analyze the data, write our report, prepare it for public distribution, and create a presentation of our findings for the broader Gobabeb staff and the Topnaar traditional authority.
Quickly summarizing, we aimed to find out how two things impacted !nara health: herbivory and fog water access. Professor Bolger, who leads the Namibia portion of the FSP, has been conducting a study on !nara with other partners, whose preliminary findings suggest that herbivory is detrimental to !nara health, and we wanted to find out if those results were generalizable. We found that herbivory does seem to have an impact on !nara health, though not as drastically as the initial study suggested.
Our team exploring the coastal delta !nara populations approaching the Atlantic Ocean.
Perhaps our most interesting finding, and most concerning, are the potential impacts that (you guessed it!) anthropogenic climate change could have on !nara. Our research suggests that the unregulated extraction of water downstream is having a tremendous negative impact on delta !nara populations, and rising global temperatures could restrict the condensation of fog only to higher altitudes – where !nara does not grow. Fog water, and ground water are the only two effective water sources for !nara, and it is quickly losing access to both. It is also a species with a low recruitment rate and long-life span (estimated at 100+ years), which could heavily impact its ability to adapt to changing circumstances. A loss in !nara health or !nara productivity would be ecologically and economically devastating for the entire Lower Kuiseb region.
Is there a more fitting way to conclude the environmental studies FSP than getting depressed about the implications of human-induced climate change? As heartbreaking as it is, I don’t think there is. Such is the condition of the world we find ourselves in. This FSP has taught me more – about the world, academia, research, and myself – than it would ever be practical for me to try and write out. So instead of trying to list them all, I am going to let those lessons inform my future actions.
19 Nov 2018