Ecology of the past

My name’s Alfred Houngnon, native of Benin Republic in West Africa. I hold an agricultural engineering degree in “Rangeland Management and Conservation” (Abomey-Calavi University). After gaining relevant field experience, I obtained a French Government Bursary to pursue an MSc degree in “Tropical Plant Biodiversity” at Montpellier (France). There, I learned about how to use indicators of past environmental and climatic change to give insights into projected future change.

It was a great scientific experience to participate in-person at the XXI INQUA Congress 2023 in Rome (Italy). This opportunity came under the supervision of William Gosling, and with the support of the Mapping Ancient Africa (MAA) project funded by INQUA’s Palaeoclimate commission (PALCOM). I have been working with Will for a number of years and published a first paper related to this work in 2021; a checklist of vascular plants from a ‘relict’ forest in Benin (Houngnon et al., 2021). A second manuscript is under development and was accepted for poster and oral presentation at INQUA 2023 congress that brought together around 4000 abstracts.

Interview 1: Alfred Houngnon (AGIR)

The bursary from the MAA project allowed me to also attend the MAA Rome workshops held at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (12-13 July 2023). During the workshops, I was trained in two novel approaches to palaeoclimate modeling. The first based on interfacing paleoclimate models through the “pastclim” R package (Michela Leonardi), and the second on reconstructing palaeoclimates on the basis of ancient pollen data using the “CREST” program (Manu Chevalier). The workshops helped me to sharpen the communication of my ideas and in so doing strengthened the manuscript in preparation for submission to an international journal for publication.

I believe that INQUA Rome Congress 2023, empowered me with very useful scientific resources, and with new interesting scientist contact with whom I can deepen my work reconstructing the palaeoenviornments of the Dahomey Gap (Benin).

I am also engaged as a volunteer for “Science to Serve Citizens”, in AGIR (Integrated Resources Management Association), in which we are co-working with local communities to restore degraded land around Dahomey Gap forest relics by revisiting traditional conservation and landscape management practices. The ultimate goal of AGIR is to highlight the way indigenous people can participate in the conservation function locally today.

References

Houngnon, A., Adomou, A.C., Gosling, W.D. & Adeonipekun, P.A. (2021) A checklist of vascular plants of Ewe-Adakplame Relic Forest in Benin, West Africa. PhytoKeys 175, 151. DOI: 10.3897/phytokeys.175.61467