The road to ecological disaster is paved with good intentions. Years ago, an aid organization introduced Prosopis to Kenya. The relative of the acacia seemed like the perfect plant to rejuvenate the arid regions of Kenya. It grew quickly in intense heat, thrived in arid soil, renewed forage on rangeland and provided wood for charcoal [...]
At first glance, the Turkana Basin can seem like a desolate place with a pretty simple food web. Looking out over the landscape, there are widely spaced acacias across the sand flats with scrubby, needle-bearing Indigofera shrubs filling in the gaps for hungry herbivores.
After an early morning in Nairobi, everyone boarded a small plane and we flew north up the Great Rift Valley. We watched the green highlands give way to the arid Northwest: our home for the next ten weeks.
For paleontologists and archaeologists it can take a lot of imagination to conjure up the ancient environments that surrounded the animals and artifacts being excavated. Without a clear idea of the environmental context that surrounded the material exhumed from the ground, it’s tough to examine the clues to paleoecological interactions preserved beneath our [...]
After months of anticipation, hundreds of questions and a couple bouts of packing, weighing and re-packing, the Spring 2013 Turkana Basin Field School is finally underway and so is the field blog. Over the next few months, check-in here if you want to know what's going on in the Turkana Basin, what we're learning, and [...]