Minutes of the meeting about past work and Future Progress in Geomorphology in the Namib

At the SASQUA meeting at Gobabeb in September, Sue Ringrose chaired a short meeting for us all to discuss work in the Namib and through Gobabeb and where this might go in the future. I post the minutes of that meeting here for our reference and a basis for getting started with further discussions.

PAST WORK AND FUTURE PROGRESS – GEOMORPHOLOGY IN THE NAMIB (GBB)

Chair: Dr Sue Ringrose

Attendees: About forty participants of the SASQUA meeting at Gobabeb

A meeting was held at Gobabeb towards the end of the SAAG-SASQUA conferences on 15/09/12 to discuss the future possible role of GBB in co-ordinating research and disseminating research products in a way that would be both stimulating and interesting to the larger scientific community.

During the course of the meeting, Dr Seely explained that GBB would likely soon find itself within an UNESCO World Heritage Site which should make it easier to promote scientific research and provide the protection needed for endemic (and other) fauna and flora and their habitats/environment.

A particular initiative would be to hold an annual Desert Research Network meeting at GBB where all desert research results could be shared via an international forum starting in 2013 with all welcome.  (see below)..

Most of the SASQUA research scientists and students attended the meeting and considered the potential in terms of services/data that GBB offers in relation to seven possible themes namely:

1. Morphology/movement of sand dunes – dust issue
2. Archaeological questions
3. Palaeohydrology of Kuiseb (and other ephemeral rivers)
4.  Palaeo-climatic reconstruction – from range of sediments and dating techniques
5.  Duricrust formation – gypcrete/calcrete esp. in relation to fog – water table change
6. Soil, landscape, plant inter-relationships
7. (Physical) weathering rates including salt effects

While useful, these themes were generally considered somewhat narrow with a need to broaden the overall scope and promote more integrated work – usefully avoiding the term ‘geomorphology’ – maybe replacing it with integrated earth science (IES)

While details were considered, the general feeling of the group was that:

• GBB is ideally placed as a centre for all aspects of inter/multi-disciplinary desert research
• That the best way to promote inter-active/inter-disciplinary research based out of GBB was to hold annual meetings around integrated desert research and to invite regional and international participants (and possible keynote speakers)
• The inter-disciplinary areas to include earth/biotic/atmospheric and marine sciences
• Biannual SAAG or SASQUA meetings could be run in conjunction with these meetings
• The annual integrated desert research meeting should involve participants from the SPACES project (marine, terrestrial and atmospheric) who could then interact with personnel from the ongoing GBB atmospheric monitoring collaborators, including Max-Plank atmospheric monitoring group, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology & University of Basel land-surface monitoring and the BSRN stations

Topics of future research could include:

1. Variability of fogs events/intensity in the light of climate change
2. Application of recent remote sensing techniques (lidar, hyperspectral, MISR-HR package, etc)
3. Use of mine exploration data from terminated exploration/operating leases – for stratigraphic control especially on buried alluvial channels
4.  Development of dust related projects (aerosol work)
5. Coastal erosion/deposition in light of recent sea level rises
6. More extensive archaeological/cave midden work along upper-mid Kuiseb. 
7. Plant biotech research on desiccation tolerance

The following ideas were raised with a view of expanding the area of ‘user friendly’ promotional scientific information dissemination (to promote the scientific profile of GBB).

1. The development of scientific materials for international dissemination in earth system science  - SR to follow up with S.A. ACCESS (South African Centre for Earth System Science) who put out similar material on the web
2. Contact University of Stellenbosch to determine whether their Masters students in Scientific writing (in Dept of Journalism) can be involved in research dissemination
3. Promote integrative ideas like the development of the Dune Atlas
4. Promote and protect sites of serious scientific interest (especially known archaeological sites) in the light of increasing tourist numbers (and as result of Adventure Tourism Global Meeting in Namibia)
5. Promote the use of GBB facilities for taught African experience masters programmes with the need for research activities with communities.

Sue Ringrose and Mary Seely

After two fantastic conferences (SAAG and SASQUA) hosted at the Gobabeb Training and Research Centre this September (2012) there was some formal and informal discussion about the future direction of research that involves Gobabeb - research both based at and through this excellent resource (in terms of infrastructure and personnel).

To this end, I hope that a blogpage such as this can serve as a useful forum for sharing information and ideas about current and future research that involves Gobabeb. Please do get involved! (it is easy to add you as an admin/author to the blog - for now contact Abi (abi.stone@gmail.com), but soon any of the authors who become involved should be able to add other authors)!

Many thanks to all at Gobabeb for their part in running these excellent academic meetings and also to Frank Ekhardt, Brian Chase and those they enlisted to help them.