Professor William Bond

Professor William Bond is an ecologist with broad interests in the processes most strongly influencing vegetation change in the past and present, including fire, vertebrate herbivory, atmospheric C02 and climate change.

Bond obtained a PhD degree in ecology at the University of California, Los Angeles in the US in 1987. He started out as a scientist at the forestry department, Saasveld Forestry Research, and later moved on to the University of Cape Town where he is now an emeritus professor in biological sciences. He is currently chief scientist at the South African Environmental Observation Network.

Bond has served on the boards of the South African National Botanical Institute and of Cape Nature, and on the editorial boards of several journals. In 2013, he was elected a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences. He is frequently invited to give talks at international conferences and symposia, and has reviewed for many journals.

He has authored and co-authored nearly 200 papers and three books. He has been invited to co-author and contribute to several pieces, including a completely new introductory book on world fire, an article on fire ecology for an Encyclopaedia of Biodiversity and a “topical insight” on global fire for the new edition of Strasburger’s Plant Sciences.

As of February 2014, Bond’s work had received about 16 980 citations. Since 2009, 47 of these citations indicated sustained scientific impact. His most cited first author paper (2008; Ann Rev Ecol Evol Syst) with 246 citations, won a Science Faculty prize at UCT. He was recently ranked by Thomson Reuters as one of the top 3 200 most influential researchers around the globe.

Bond’s research has had significant impact on different areas of ecology at different phases of his career. 

His earlier research has culminated in a focus on identifying open (non-forested) ecosystems as a global anomaly to the widespread assumption that climate controls global biome distribution. 

The mere existence of open ecosystems raised a number of important questions in the scientific community — Bond was among the first to identify these questions and to help initiate research to address most of them.

Thanks to him and his colleagues, there has been a huge proliferation of studies on fires over the last decade, and traditional assumptions on what determines global vegetation are in the process of radical revision.