DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY

Scalable Ecosystem Monitoring In Kenya: Soil health And human-wildlife coexistence

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Description

African ecosystems represent the vibrant heart of the continent?s wellbeing: as thriving habitat for the abundant, unique wildlife, as a basis for humanity?s survival and growth (e.g. clean water, agriculture, resilience), and as a key economic factor (e.g. clean energy provision, food, critical materials, tourism). Adapting to and combatting the ecological crises already battering Africa is crucial for its future, in which protecting and restoring terrestrial ecosystems will assume an inevitable role. One pertinent problem in sub-Saharan Africa is to improve agricultural yields for growing nutritious demand whilst restoring ecosystems on limited arable, already-degraded land. Increasingly encroached spaces, stressed by climate extremes and anthropogenic expansion, also proliferate human-wildlife conflicts that threaten shared multi-species livelihoods, balanced biodiversity, local productivity, as well as the economically important sector of sustainable wildlife tourism. Understanding complex ecosystems can only advance through data-driven evidence of their state, evolution, and sustainable interventions, and thereby inform decision-making. Scaling up data acquisition across large, complex landscapes is the key bottleneck. Our new paradigm--to bring physics into the ecosystem instead of ecosystems into labs or computers--aims at tackling this data-poverty crisis at scale. Ecosystem monitoring is extremely difficult: any comprehensive understanding of interactions between diverse agents, and how they change across spatial and temporal scales, across regions and over time, requires scalable, non-invasive, information-dense, well-understood data, ideally in real-time. To meet some of the most urgent and demanding challenges unfolding across Africa and elsewhere, this is the only viable path forward. We suggest conducting in-field physics applied to two key challenges in Africa: food provision and wildlife conflict, both intrinsically embedded in the climate crisis, while offering scalable climate solutions, improving community resilience and local stakeholder empowerment. This project will develop and deploy a rigorous physics-based ecosystem monitoring framework that integrates non-invasive geophysical data acquisition, sensor technology, and community co-design to address two intersecting challenges: Monitoring and restoring soil health by creating tomographic imaging of the evolving 3D soil, and mitigating crop-raiding elephant conflict by an early-warning system for farmers. We will design a modular, open-hardware physics-informed sensor kit (~£20-30 /unit), to be locally assembled at minimal cost and effort, for detecting seismic and environmental signals relevant to soil structure, moisture, weather and wildlife movement. This will be facilitated by symbiotic expertise between Kenyan and UK research, academic, non-profit institutions which already forged deep partnerships, each bringing into the project an integral role leading essential subprojects, ensuring equity and reciprocity. By the end of the project, we will have: Two physics-based monitoring sites operating in Kenya; open-source designs for wide-spread adaptation; a new generation of trained local physicists, environmental scientists, and farmers; demonstrated proof that physics research can drive solutions to imminent real-world problems. The combined effort on scaling up sensing while skilling up farmers, students, and scientists will break new grounds for large-scale ecosystem monitoring across Africa, not only to support local communities and scientists in their mitigation and adaption to the climate and ecological crises, but to empower them to lead innovations with bespoke solutions that may propel Africa to the fore of tackling these crises, and lead the way for other world regions that will face similar problems in the future. This unites rigorous scientific innovation with ethical, participatory implementation ? a model for how intersectional physics collaborations can work for people and the planet.

Objectives

African ecosystems represent the vibrant heart of the continent?s wellbeing: as thriving habitat for the abundant, unique wildlife, as a basis for humanity?s survival and growth (e.g. clean water, agriculture, resilience), and as a key economic factor (e.g. clean energy provision, food, critical materials, tourism). Adapting to and combatting the ecological crises already battering Africa is crucial for its future, in which protecting and restoring terrestrial ecosystems will assume an inevitable role. One pertinent problem in sub-Saharan Africa is to improve agricultural yields for growing nutritious demand whilst restoring ecosystems on limited arable, already-degraded land. Increasingly encroached spaces, stressed by climate extremes and anthropogenic expansion, also proliferate human-wildlife conflicts that threaten shared multi-species livelihoods, balanced biodiversity, local productivity, as well as the economically important sector of sustainable wildlife tourism. Understanding complex ecosystems can only advance through data-driven evidence of their state, evolution, and sustainable interventions, and thereby inform decision-making. Scaling up data acquisition across large, complex landscapes is the key bottleneck. Our new paradigm--to bring physics into the ecosystem instead of ecosystems into labs or computers--aims at tackling this data-poverty crisis at scale. Ecosystem monitoring is extremely difficult: any comprehensive understanding of interactions between diverse agents, and how they change across spatial and temporal scales, across regions and over time, requires scalable, non-invasive, information-dense, well-understood data, ideally in real-time. To meet some of the most urgent and demanding challenges unfolding across Africa and elsewhere, this is the only viable path forward. We suggest conducting in-field physics applied to two key challenges in Africa: food provision and wildlife conflict, both intrinsically embedded in the climate crisis, while offering scalable climate solutions, improving community resilience and local stakeholder empowerment. This project will develop and deploy a rigorous physics-based ecosystem monitoring framework that integrates non-invasive geophysical data acquisition, sensor technology, and community co-design to address two intersecting challenges: Monitoring and restoring soil health by creating tomographic imaging of the evolving 3D soil, and mitigating crop-raiding elephant conflict by an early-warning system for farmers. We will design a modular, open-hardware physics-informed sensor kit (~£20-30 /unit), to be locally assembled at minimal cost and effort, for detecting seismic and environmental signals relevant to soil structure, moisture, weather and wildlife movement. This will be facilitated by symbiotic expertise between Kenyan and UK research, academic, non-profit institutions which already forged deep partnerships, each bringing into the project an integral role leading essential subprojects, ensuring equity and reciprocity. By the end of the project, we will have: Two physics-based monitoring sites operating in Kenya; open-source designs for wide-spread adaptation; a new generation of trained local physicists, environmental scientists, and farmers; demonstrated proof that physics research can drive solutions to imminent real-world problems. The combined effort on scaling up sensing while skilling up farmers, students, and scientists will break new grounds for large-scale ecosystem monitoring across Africa, not only to support local communities and scientists in their mitigation and adaption to the climate and ecological crises, but to empower them to lead innovations with bespoke solutions that may propel Africa to the fore of tackling these crises, and lead the way for other world regions that will face similar problems in the future. This unites rigorous scientific innovation with ethical, participatory implementation ? a model for how intersectional physics collaborations can work for people and the planet.

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Location

The country, countries or regions that benefit from this Programme.

Kenya