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The CIB’s first graduates, Ulrike
Irlich, Michelle Greve and Jeanne Gouws
(Photo: Anton Jordaan (SSFD)).
Right:
Ndivhuwo Luruli.
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Jeanne Gouws, Michelle Greve, Ulrike
Irlich and Ndivhuwo Luruli made history when they became the first MSc
graduates produced by the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence for Invasion Biology
(CIB).
They received their degrees during
the March graduation ceremony of the faculties of Science and AgriSciences –
and all cum laude to boot!
Another MSc student, Gené Guthrie,
graduated from the University of the Western Cape.
The multi-institutional CIB, with
its headquarters at Stellenbosch University (SU), was established in 2004 as
part of the DST-NRF Centres of Excellence Programme.
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It is co-funded
principally by the South African Department of Science and Technology (DST)
through the National Research Foundation (NRF) and SU.
Its focus is on how biological
diversity is altered by invasive plants and animals, and the effects they have
on the functioning of ecosystems and the services they deliver. This provides
scientific information that assists policy makers and managers with rational
decision-making options regarding invasive alien species.
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A Slovakian-born botanist in the Department of
Botany and Zoology, Prof Ladislav Mucina, has helped to rewrite his
adopted motherland’s vegetation history.
JPH Acocks’s Veld Types of South Africa has been the standard reference
on the indigenous vegetation of South Africa used by ecologists,
farmers, environmental consultants and other students of natural
systems since the 1950s, but it was in serious need of updating.
This led to the National Vegetation Map of South Africa Project
(VEGMAP), with Prof Mucina and Dr Mike Rutherford of the SA National
Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) as driving forces.
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Prof Ladislav
Mucina in front of the Vegetation Map of South Africa, Lesotho and
Swaziland, which is a product of VEGMAP. (Photo: Frans Radloff)
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It was funded by the
Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism (DEAT), with support
from the Norwegian government, and was managed by SANBI.
South African scientists and academics, along with colleagues from
Swaziland, Lesotho, Germany and the Netherlands, helped the duo to
collect data from all possible published sources. Fieldwork was done by
a small army of colleagues and the editors themselves to fill in the
gaps where data was inadequate.
Thanks to VEGMAP, Acock’s original seven biomes have been extended to
nine continental biomes and two on the Prince Edward Islands, and his
79 veld types to 435!
The project’s first product, the 1:1 000 000 Vegetation Map of South
Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland, rolled off the printing press in 2005.
The final cartographic work for this huge and beautiful, colourful wall
map was done by Mr Adriaan van Niekerk and Prof Hannes van der Merwe of
the Centre for Spatial Analysis in the SU Department of Geology,
Geography and Environmental Studies.
The comprehensive 807-page full-colour book The Vegetation of South
Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland, with Prof Mucina and Dr Rutherford as
co-editors, was launched in May as part of DEAT’s International
Biodiversity Day celebrations.
The bulky book includes descriptions of each vegetation type, including
details on distribution, landscape features, geology and soils, its
endemic taxa, conservation status and biogeographically important taxa.
It also includes a bound 1:1 000 000 atlas.
The VEGMAP products have already been embraced by their potential users
as the authoritative word when it comes to the vegetation treasures of
Southern Africa.
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Photo:
Prof Alex Kisters
and members of his multi-national research team, lecturer Dr
Jean-Francois Moyen, PhD student Cynthia Sanchez-Garrido from France,
and post-doctoral fellow Dr Cristiano Lana from Brazil, in front of the
Chamber of Mines building. It is being refurbished to serve as the new
home of the amalgamated Department of Geology, Geography and
Environmental Studies.
(Photo: Engela Duvenage)
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Geologists often find themselves in hostile
locations and conditions – all in the name of science. Playing his part
in promoting the wonders of the earth sciences recently put Geology
professor Alex Kisters in a different yet equally difficult spot – a
filming location.
As part of a National Geographic documentary on the early evolution of
the earth’s crust, he had to endure Mpumalanga in the middle of
February – at 35°C and 100% humidity! And, of course, the spotlight and
cameras rolling for two days.
“Sometimes I had to say the same things twenty times over,” he remembers his ’acting days’.
The documentary Naked Science: Colliding Continents has been aired on
South African television since September last year, and was also
screened in the USA. Another documentary on the same topic will be
released later this year, and will feature Prof Kister’s colleague from
Stellenbosch University, Prof Gary Stevens.
“The filming crew visited the Grand Canyon, Iceland and the Alps for
the documentary, but these are quite young examples compared to what we
find in the Barberton area in Mpumalanga,” says Prof Kisters, who, as
an archaean geologist, studies the evolution of early earth older than
2,6 billion years.
Prof Kisters recently co-authored a paper on archaean geodynamics in
the Barberton greenstone belt east of Badplaas for the esteemed
scientific journal Nature with colleagues Dr Jean-Francois Moyen and
Prof Stevens. They showed that the tectonic evolution of the planet was
similar 3,2 billion years ago to what it is today.
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