Out-Of-The-Box Thinking about a Positive Future: “Seeds of a Good Anthropocene” Open Science Dialogue

Last week, on the 3rd and 4th of November, more than 60 academics, practitioners, and students from around South Africa gathered at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (STIAS) for an open science dialogue on the “Seeds of a Good Anthropocene: A Southern African Perspective”, organized by SAPECS and the Centre for Studies in Complexity. The Anthropocene is a new planetary era in which the extent of human impact on the Earth and its systems has come to rival the great forces of nature. There is growing recognition that dramatic socio‐cultural, political and technological changes are required to achieve a [...]

2015-01-22T11:10:53+02:00November 10th, 2014|SAPECS News|

Project Update: Testing the Water – how Cape Town urbanites use, value and impact water-related ecosystem services in Table Mountain National Park

For the past year and a half, PhD student Gregg Brill has been interviewing Cape Town residents who visit Table Mountain National Park, in order to understand user behaviour, environmental perceptions, as well as the values individuals assign to an urban protected area. More specifically, Gregg looks at how visitors use, value and impact water-related ecosystem services in the park over space and time. User groups interviewed in this study included sporting groups, religious assemblies, scientific organisations, conservation volunteers, hiking clubs, environmental agencies, researchers and various other clusters. Surveys distributed to user groups document the length of park access and [...]

2014-10-03T13:59:45+02:00September 25th, 2014|SAPECS News|

SAPECS Winter School turns up the heat in the Garden Route

Surrounded by the beautiful Outeniqua Mountains and situated within deeply green pine plantations, the NMMU campus at Saasveld provided a perfect retreat from the hustle and bustle of everyday life for 21 students from all over southern Africa. The students had gathered in this tranquil place near George, South Africa, to participate in the very first SAPECS winter school held from the 30th of June to the 4th of July 2014. The main goal of the winter school was to develop the capacity of these new scholars in the field of social-ecological systems to plan, execute and interpret their research. [...]

2014-07-09T12:47:53+02:00July 9th, 2014|SAPECS News|

Introductory reading: Applying Resilience Thinking

A new popular science publication has been produced by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, entitled "Applying resilience thinking - Seven principles for building resilience in social-ecological systems". This is a popular summary of the Cambridge University book "Principles for Building Resilience: Sustaining Ecosystem Services in Social-Ecological Systems" (2014). This book, in turn, expands on the comprehensive review "Towards principles for enhancing the resilience of ecosystem services" by Reinette Biggs et al., published in the journal Annual Reviews of Environment and Resources in 2012. Many SAPECS-affiliated researchers were involved in the process of compiling the review, book and popular summary. For more [...]

2014-04-28T13:03:35+02:00April 28th, 2014|SAPECS News|

Project update: It’s less about elephants, and more about space…

To compete for a burgeoning tourist market looking for a great wildlife experience,  protected areas (particularly more commercially driven privately-owned ones) often over-stock on charismatic species. But do more charismatic species equate to more visitors, and more revenue? In a paper recently published in the journal Ecological Applications, and featured more popularly in the magazine “Conservation”, Kristi Maciejewski and Graeme Kerley from the SAPECS-affiliated Protected Areas Project find that this is not necessarily the case.  In their study, carried out in the Eastern Cape, higher elephant densities did not translate to increased elephant sightings, nor increased revenue.  The researchers argue that, paradoxically, [...]

2014-04-07T10:53:41+02:00April 7th, 2014|SAPECS News|

SAPECS Working Groups Workshop held in Grahamstown

A very hot and humid Grahamstown welcomed more than twenty researchers and PhD students to the 4th meeting of the SAPECS Working Groups between 27th and 30th January 2014, held at Rhodes University. Existing working groups met to further discussions and collaborations that were initiated last year, and new working groups were formed to respond to emerging research gaps identified by the wider SAPECS community. Three full days of workshopping were complemented with a fieldtrip to Grahamstown’s commonages, which represent fascinating examples of social-ecological systems that provide a variety of ecosystem services to local people (like firewood, grazing for cattle, [...]

2014-02-25T14:02:21+02:00February 20th, 2014|SAPECS News|

Project update: Governance of Ecosystem Services under Scenarios of Change

For two years, PhD students Vanessa Masterson and Maike Hamann have explored the links between ecosystem services, human well-being and sense of place in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. At the local scale, Vanessa has spent five months in the Centane district on the Wild Coast, conducting interviews and focus group discussions with villagers and migrant workers about their connection to the landscape, small-scale farming and the use of natural resources. She has also used participatory methods including photovoice and community mapping to characterize the sense of place of small-scale farmers and their migrant family networks, and explored [...]

2013-12-16T12:23:13+02:00December 16th, 2013|SAPECS News|

SAPECS colloquium in Cape Town

The Southern African Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (SAPECS) held its first colloquium on the ‘Frontiers of Social-Ecological Research’ in Cape Town, South Africa, on the 15th and 16th of April this year. The SAPECS colloquium brought together almost 100 researchers, students, and practitioners interested in the study and management of social-ecological systems and ecosystem services in southern Africa. Set in the beautiful Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, the colloquium was organized around the following six SAPECS research themes: Links between ecosystem services and human well-being, with an emphasis on poverty and inequality; How governance and management institutions and practices affect [...]

2013-05-21T13:11:27+02:00May 16th, 2013|SAPECS News|
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