Congratulations to PhD candidate Evan Hockridge (Andrew Davies, advisor) awarded The Garden Club of America Fellowship in Tropical Botany for his project, "Islands in the forest: Spatiotemporal patterns of ecosystem structure, composition, and function in Central African forest clearings."
The fellowship will allow Hockridge spend three months in the Odzala-Kokoua National park, Republic of the Congo measuring plant diversity, tree diameters, collecting soil cores, and managing camera traps in an effort to study and better understand clearings in the Congo rainforest called bais. Bais are very important to the general ecology of the Western Congo Basin as they are prime hotspots of herbaceous biodiversity and animal activity. However, bais are starting to be encroached by trees across the forests of Central Africa, likely leading to detrimental impacts on the ecosystems in this landscape. Hockridge will study and describe the plant diversity, soil nutrient conditions, vegetation structure, animal visitation patterns, hydrology, and topographical variation of these forest clearings. Doing so will help researchers to better understand the basic ecological characteristics of these ecosystems enabling them to begin to understand why encroachment is occurring and plan management strategies to ensure their persistence.