In September, AGRI-DRY doctoral researcher Alexandra Vasilyeva from the University of Glasgow carried out her final fieldwork campaign. With her team, she travelled across parts of South Africa’s North West Province, surveying a range of vegetation types around the Vredefort Dome and further north. The main goal was to collect surface soil samples for pollen extraction and conduct detailed vegetation surveys at each sampling site.
These data will help the researchers understand how pollen from different plant species is represented in pollen assemblages and calculate relative pollen productivity (RPP) estimates for selected species. These relationships remain understudied, and establishing them will contribute to more accurate pollen-based palaeoecological and land-cover reconstructions.
The fieldwork team also collected a set of samples from ponds and dams to compare pollen representation patterns across different sediment types and contribute to the surface pollen database for South Africa.
Alexandra thanks her supervisors Bianca Cavazzin and Frank Neumann for joining her in the field, and Nicki Whitehouse for helping to organise the campaign. She is grateful to students and staff members at North-West University for their help during the field trips, as well as MSc student Bella Brown at University of Glasgow, who will analyse aquatic samples. Special thanks go to Reinier Terblanche for his help with plant identification in the field.
Photos: Bianca Cavazzin, Alexandra Vasilyeva
The fieldwork was supported by the AGRI-DRY Doctoral Network, funded by the European Union and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).
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