Fieldwork | Shuang - Scientist

Zambia · Africa Water–Food Nexus Survey

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Why we went

The water–food nexus in Southern Africa is where global rhetoric meets very local realities. Zambia sits at the top of the Zambezi system, and the way it manages water echoes through every downstream economy. The project I joined wanted ground-truthed material on how irrigation expansion, smallholder farming and basin governance actually interact — not the version that flattens out in pan-African dashboards.

What we did

The trip moved between basin authorities, smallholder fields and irrigation cooperatives — interviewing officials, walking plot to plot with farmers, and assembling the picture that the formal water-allocation accounts could not show. We left with hours of recorded interviews, paired field measurements, and a sharper sense of where the project’s modelling assumptions would and would not hold.

What stayed with me

You can read every African water assessment ever written and still miss the basic fact that the date the rain comes back is the only one that matters. The most useful column we brought home wasn’t a flow figure — it was a list of the conversations that changed our framing of the problem.

From the field

Inner Mongolia · Agro-Pastoral Ecotone

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Why we went

The agro-pastoral ecotone of Inner Mongolia sits at the climatic and cultural seam between cropland and steppe. Statistical aggregates and remote-sensing pixels can show how that boundary is moving — but they can’t tell you why a herder switches to fenced pasture, why a village abandons mobile grazing, or how a single drought year reshuffles a household’s options for the next decade. We came to listen to the system on the ground.

What we did

Since the summer of 2020 we have returned to the ecotone every year — sampling soils and grasses along fixed transects, sitting through long evenings of interviews with herders and village cadres, walking the same pastures across seasons. The dataset is now half a decade of paired ecological measurements and household surveys, layered onto the policy shifts the residents have lived through: grazing bans, ecological compensation, livestock-price swings.

What stayed with me

The model on my screen has gotten sharper over five years, but most of what makes it useful came from these trips. A herder once told us that the grass remembers more than we do — and the longer we stay, the more I think the data has to be patient enough to remember too.

From the field

Tibetan Plateau · Second Scientific Expedition

Thu, 01 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Why we went

The Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition (STEP) is China’s flagship multi-decade earth-science program — the long-overdue successor to the original 1970s plateau survey. The plateau supplies water to nearly two billion people downstream, and the question every team carried was the same: how is this water tower changing, and what is changing alongside it? My piece sat with hydrology and the human side of the system.

What we did

We worked at altitudes above 4,000 m — walking transects across alpine meadows, sampling source-region streams, and sitting with herders whose grazing calendars had quietly shifted with the snowline. The expedition’s rare luxury was that cryospheric, ecological and socio-economic teams entered the same valleys at the same time, so cross-team conversations were possible in a way they almost never are. I came home with notebooks of household stories and a colder respect for how thin the air is up there.

What stayed with me

What surprised me wasn’t the glaciers — those are everyone’s story. It was how readable the change was in the herders’ own words: which pastures had gone dry, which routes had become unsafe, which children had moved to town. Snow-cover and discharge data tell the same story — but slower. The plateau is changing faster than the academic timeline.