By Dr Kate Evans | Founder & CEO
We try to live our lives as sustainably as possible and our remote camp is not doing too bad, with solar powered fridge and freezers in the kitchen, all our lights are solar and hot water is heated by the sun. So when we started our feeding ecology work aimed at studying the drivers of elephant movement had a problem to solve; how to dry the elephant dung, vegetation and soil samples. To meet export and import requirements we needed to heat the samples to 63oC for at least 30 minutes to kill any potential biohazards for export as well as ensure they were probably dried to avoid them going mouldy.
Intern Imani Wilson, from Bangor University, was set the task of building a solar oven, as drying dung samples in our gas oven in the kitchen certainly was not an option!! Internet research and a little patience waiting for supplies from builder suppliers in Maun town and Imani was able to test the solar oven, flying an egg and then making sure it met the requirements for biohazards. Hey presto the power of the sun was harnessed once more, and our sample are slowly accumulating from our research drives and drying efforts.
Well done Imani.
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