Aynalem Degefa
The main target of my PhD research at the University of Ghent, Belgium, is to reconstruct and quantify the rates of soil erosion in the Lake Baringo basin, Kenya. The Lake Baringo landscape has been severely affected by land degradation, especially during the past couple of centuries as environmental stresses mounted in relation to rapidly rising population pressure. Coupled together with drought and increased climate variability, this resulted in severe soil erosion that affected the fragile ecosystems of Lake Baringo leading to severe siltation. The main theme of my research project is to reconstruct past soil erosion rates in the past 200-250 years. I plan to apply sediment geochemistry, high resolution magnetic susceptibility, and XRF analysis to track events of severe soil erosion at catchment scale using lake sediment cores and surface soil samples. Land use change, RS data and documented historical records will be coupled with lake sediment archives. I will also be interested to examine recent lake level fluctuations in the past decade.