The AFRIVAL project supported by the European Research Council
Alberto BORGES, a researcher at the Laboratory of Chemical Oceanology (FOCUS Research Unit / Faculty of Science), has just been awarded, with his colleges at KULeuven, an ERC Starting Grant for his AFRIVAL project - African river basins: Catchment-scale carbon fluxes and transformations - which aims to better understand the role of tropical rivers in the carbon cycle at the basin level.
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FRIVAL is a project which is being developed by the Department of Life Sciences and the Environment at the Catholic University of Leuven and the University of Liège’s Chemical Oceanography Unit. The five year funding (1,745,262 Euros, of which 729,840 has been earmarked for the ULiège) will allow the role played by tropical rivers in the carbon cycle to be explored on a catchment scale. The project benefits from a wide scale of analytical approaches to better understand the biogeochemistry of these systems, markers such as stable isotopic signatures and the Carbon 14 dating of various carbon pools, biomarkers and measurements of processes such as respiration rates, primary production rates and CO2 air-water fluxes. Fieldwork within the framework of AFRIVAL will take place in Kenya, Zambia, Mozambique, Niger, Gabon, Madagascar and the Congo Basin (Democratic Republic of Congo). This project is being built upon the basis of previous joint projects in tropical estuaries and mangroves in South East Asia and Eastern Africa.
ERC Starting Grant
ERC Grants are major instruments deployed by the European Research Council to fund research projects in Europe. The procedure, extremely selective, selects only the best researchers and research projects of the highest level, combining audacity and competence to tackle new research avenues likely, in the event of success, to substantially enrich knowledge.
There are 5 types of grants: Starting Grants, Consolidator Grants, Advanced Grants, Synergy Grants and Proof of Concept
Sarting ERC grants are designed to help young researchers (2-7 years of experience since completing their PhD) with a very promising scientific record and excellent research proposal.
