Fieldwork collecting plant traits in Zambia and Kenya

Fieldwork collecting plant traits in Zambia and Kenya

img 7550 copy

 

species86b 74 2 26 04 copy

Eva Herreros-Moya and Kieran Storer, members of the Oxford Long Ecology Lab, along with George MacKay and Henry Portwood, MBiol students, embarked on  research expeditions to Zambia (April 2024) and Kenya (July 2024).

This study is part of our collaboration with the Innovative Vector Control Consortium (IVCC), a not-for-profit company investigating the efficacy of Attractive Targeted Sugar Baits (ATSBs) in Zambia, Kenya, and Mali. ATSBs contain sugars present in nectar that attract mosquitoes and an insecticide to kill them. Our role in the project is to better understand if local vegetation might impact the efficacy of the ATSBs. To achieve this, we collected plant traits of the most abundant species from six different clusters in the districts of Kaoma, Luampa, and Nkeyema in Zambia. In each cluster, we typically visited two or three family compounds depending on the species of plants in flower that we found. We visited the compounds with a member of PATH Kaoma and a health practitioner who knew the communities and explained the activities we would carry out. The day before sampling, we bagged the flowers to prevent insect foraging, and the following day, we measured the plant traits of the bagged flowers. The plant traits and compounds we measured were:

  1. The width and length of the corolla of the flower.
  2. The nectar volume of different flowers (five samples per plant species).
  3. The sugar concentration of the flower (five samples per plant species).
  4. The shape of the corolla.
  5. The abundance of flowers of different specimens of the most abundant plant species.
  6. CO2 emitted by different flowers during respiration.

We continued our measurements in Nick Wightman's garden in Lusaka. Nick is our local botanist in Zambia, and he previously conducted vegetation surveys in Kaoma to identify the most abundant plant species in the different clusters.

Our stay in Kaoma was extremely positive and useful; we have measured around 90 plant species (nearly 500 flowers). We are very grateful to the PATH team, especially to Mundia Masuzyo, Frank Ndalama, Chama Chishya, and Benjamin Chanda, who have been very supportive and helpful during our stay in Kaoma.

Project page: Developing a new methodology to identify and predict competition of local flora with ATSBs in Africa