I am born on Ethiopian Christmas. Thirty three years later, I find myself posting my first entry on nature.com under the title Olives, frankincense and coffee, my personal version of the wider known Christmas threesome, gold, frankincense, and mirrh.

As a forest ecologist I have been working in Ethiopia from 2001 to 2005 and I continue to work on Ethiopian data in Belgium until present. The ecology and management of the African wild olive tree and the frankincense tree Boswellia papyrifera have kept me busy for the past seven years, and if all goes well, I’ll add at least three years dedicated to wild Arabica coffee, explaining the title above (and the image below).

In this blog, provisionally called African Blog of Ecology, I intend to post random thoughts and intriguing questions on a broad range of ecological topics, but posts are expected to be biased towards birds and forests (P=0.05).

If you want to know which birds live below sea level in Africa, or what an Ethiopian wolf eats, this is where you have to be.

Raf Aerts
Division Forest, Nature and Landscape
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Belgium

/me and a coffee forest near Jimma, Ethiopia.
Image by E. November