The organizers of the 2008 IGBP Congress (http://www.igbp2008.co.za) accepted START’s proposal to sponsor a special concurrent session for young African scientists who have benefited from the START/NORAD PhD Fellowships and from the START Africa Grants program of the US Climate Change Science Program administered by the US National Science Foundation.
The African scientists had the opportunity [...]

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as in other African countries, there is a shortage of information on global climate-related feedbacks of C stocks and fluxes from different ecological systems due to a lack of reliable field measurements. The massive tropical forest in D.R.C., strategically located around the equator, is a key element [...]

Agricultural encroachment of forestlands, as a result of the rapidly evolving agrarian reforms in Southern Africa, is an important but poorly understood external driver in soil emission of greenhouse gases (GHG). The objective of this study was to assess the impact of clearing the Savanna (Miombo) woodlands and maize-cropping with-and-without N application on soil emission [...]

Poor coastal communities suffer environmental problems such as pollution, coastal erosion, droughts and flooding. Many of these problems can be better understood with a better comprehension of the impacts of the large-scale environment, which in turn can lead to an improvement in monitoring and forecasting. This project implements a high-resolution coastal ocean model (ROMS), [...]

The lowlands and highlands of Kenya were vulnerable to changes related to both climate and land use change in the Late Holocene period. Today, these same areas of Kenya are undergoing rapid population growth and development. Some of the areas are located in very fragile ecosystems that are situated in the wettest and [...]

TThe Bight of Bonny is a permanently well-mixed coastal zone that receives high inputs of nutrients and organic and inorganic carbon from the Cross River, Qua Iboe, Imo River Estuaries and the Niger Delta in Nigeria. There have been no previous studies on measurements of CO2 fluxes at seasonal or annual scales in this [...]

The climate changes due to the increased amount of atmospheric greenhouse gasses are causing on-going alterations in the forest-level carbon exchange and the net primary production (NPP) in tropical forests. Understanding how the storage and productivity of organic matter (carbon) in tropical dry forests relates to climate change is a critical need for the management [...]