Contact Technikon Pretoria’s Attie Botha on an average weekday and the chances are you will find him out in the bush supervising hundreds of students on a game count or classifying plants.
The technikon’s department of nature conservation, which Botha heads, gives a new meaning to field research. Lecturers and students apply learning through a hands-on programme called Decision Support to the Wildlife Industry.
The department’s 17 full-time lecturers and 25 master’s and doctorate students — who come from as far as Cameroon and Tanzania — are presently involved in 40 research projects. Some of the postgraduate students are employed by South African National Parks, provincial conservation bodies or other environmental organisations.
Research projects range from an educational and community service programme in Ndumo in northern KwaZulu-Natal to a study of small mammals in Suikerbosrand provincial reserve in Gauteng; a case study of landowner perceptions in a private conservancy; projects on lions and cheetahs; a study of predator-prey interactions; and a variety of vegetation studies.
The technikon’s department of nature conservation has, for many years, been the major supplier of technically qualified managers and technicians to the wildlife industry. The decision-support programme expands this function by focusing on long-term monitoring of ecological trends in wildlife populations.
Says Brian Reilly, a senior lecturer in the department: ‘By the year 2025 the planet Earth could have lost as many as one-fifth of all species known to exist today. The increasing importance of wildlife and habitat management cannot be emphasised enough.
‘In the past, conservation areas in the Southern African Development Community region obtained most of their decision support in their wildlife management from internal scientific components. Recently there has been an increasing demand from conservation agencies, NGOs and private landowners for scientific management information, which resulted in the technikon introducing this research programme called Decision Support for the Wildlife Industry.”
Resource inventories, such as small-mammal surveys and vegetation classification, support wildlife management and monitoring, either as part of environmental impact assessments or as game-ranch management plans.
‘Research is directed at active participation in decision support to management undertakings in protected areas, ecosystems and game-ranching undertakings in savannas and grasslands, primarily in Southern Africa,” explains Reilly.
Costs of the training aspects of the decision-support programme are covered by the technikon or agencies such as the National Research Foundation. When a service is provided, a small amount is charged to private individuals, which is ploughed back into the training funds.
Senior lecturer Jozua Viljoen’s research focuses on the effects of translocation on a breeding herd of African elephants. He aims to determine whether translocated elephants have a greater impact on vegetation after release and how they respond to translocation, so that the process can be managed to minimise stress.
‘Elephants are considered a keystone species due to their ecological importance. They change the structure and dynamics of vegetation, and if populations are left to increase unchecked within enclosed wildlife reserves, serious damage to the habitat and a subsequent decrease in biological diversity could result,” Viljoen explains.
Viljoen fits radio collars on elephants in the Kruger National Park selected for translocation, and then monitors their activities with the collar signals and video recordings. The collars contain a GPS location system and an elephant-voice-activated portable radio set. Each collar has its own unique transmitting frequency so that the individual elephant making the call can be identified.
Reilly’s projects include research into methodologies for game counting at several sites. He is looking into the best techniques for helicopter surveys in the North West province and the Northern Cape, sample sizes for distance surveys in the Kruger National Park, Timbavati and Tswalu, as well as for researching game monitoring in Tanzania.
‘Apart from physically participating in the surveys, the technikon’s department of nature conservation provides the industry with support in terms of technology transfer, training and data analysis for all those projects,” Reilly says.
Another of his projects involves determining the age of lions and leopards through tooth cementum — the thin layer of bony material that fixes teeth to the jaw. This research aims to facilitate the remote monitoring of age structures in big cat populations to ensure they are sustainable.
Reilly is also researching the sustainable use and protection of helmeted guinea-fowls, an endemic African species threatened by agriculture and forestry.
Lecturers and researchers help diploma students get hands-on experience in the field by assisting in their research projects. The institution offers three-year diplomas and four-year bachelor’s degrees in nature conservation, game-ranch management and ecotourism management.