New update from the field work of our PhD researcher Luisa Pflumm in Kruger National Park! After weeks of fieldwork in the open savanna, Luisa’s work now moves into a more controlled setting, a burn chamber experiment carried out together with our collaborators from the University of Bayreuth, the University of Rhodes, and SANParks.
Within this experiment a selection of savanna trees were grown in pots as part of an experimental setup, with half of them exposed to reduced water availability over time (drought-treated) and the other half watered according to conditions typical for this region. These trees are now being placed into burn chambers with different amounts of fuel loads which are ignited under controlled conditions. The goal is to measure how the plants respond to the combined stress, looking at their hydraulics, as well as post-fire behaviour such as leaf loss, resprouting, and mortality.
Our team is accompanying the experiment with a thermal UAV. This is a useful opportunity to calibrate UAV-derived fire intensity measurements against thermocouple readings taken directly in the burn chambers, a comparison that’s hard to get in the field at this level of control.
The results will feed directly into the analysis of the larger savanna fire experiment, helping us to understand how UAV-based fire intensity measurements relate to ground conditions.
More about our results soon!
The research is done within a DFG funded project lead by Mirjana Bevanda and Tobias Ullmann.
