P4ges invites national stakeholders to visit our hydrological research and discuss research results

Prof Bruno Ramamonjisoa is interviewed by journalists about p4ges research

The visitors listen to presentations explaining p4ges research

Chandra Ghimire explains the equipment for exploring soil permeability

Ilja van Meerveld explains the blue dye infiltration experiment

Mark Mulligan explains modelling of hydrological services (while Tim Smart the British Ambassador interprets)

On the 11th September more than 45 people including the British Ambassador, the regional director of forests, the regional Director of Rural Development, representatives of the Office National pour l'Environnement and NGOs converged on Mitsinjo field station in Andasibe to discuss some of the research results p4ges has generated so far, to visit our intensely instrumented hydrological plots and to discuss some of the likely future scenarios of land use for us to explore in our modelling.

First Julia Jones (Bangor University) and Bruno Ramamonjisoa (University of Antananarivo) gave a general overview of the project summarising the diverse activities p4ges is conducting in the field and using state of the art modelling. Then Julie Razafimanahaka (Madagasikara Voakajy) gave a presentation on the work p4ges has been doing on the challenges of ensuring that social safeguard assessments (carried out to identify those negatively by conservation) do indeed identify the ‘right’ people. The presentations were in Malagasy or French with the power points in English so all the VIPs could follow the research. Discussion was in a combination of the three languages.

Then Maafaka Ravelona (Laboratoire des RadioIsotopes) introduced the hydrological work the project is doing to explore the impact of land use change on hydrology particularly focused around three intensely instrumented plots of different land uses (closed canopy forest, reforested land, highly degraded land). This presentation provided the background for the field visit.

After a delicious lunch provided by Mitsinjo we got into buses and cars to drive the short distance to the access point to our degraded site and walked up the steep slope to the site. There the visitors were split into four groups which rotated around 4 of the hydrology team-each demonstrating a different piece of equipment or experiment.

The VIPs were extremely interested and engaged in the work and we got many excellent questions. Herizo Andrianandrasana of Durrell said “As a scientist it is excellent to see these advanced approaches for exploring the effect of land use change on hydrology.” Dimby Razafimpahanana, the coordinator of Rebioma (the national biodiversity data archive) said “This work is extremely interesting and it is so good to visit it and see the equipment in the field. If you just watch a presentation you don’t get the full understanding”.

Date: 21 September 2015

Julia Jones