South Africa 3 | Town and country: aiming for ecological restoration at the landscape scale

James and Thibaud Aronson offer their third photo essay from South Africa, highlighting FOSTER, a dramatically successful community-based restoration program in the Eastern Cape, aimed at eradicating an invasive Australian acacia, and reducing urban wildfire risk, and a private restoration program at Kaboega Farm, situated in a megadiverse landscape of extraordinary conservation and educational value.

The Republic of South Africa is rightly famous for its 22-year old Working for Water program, WfW, and offshoots such as Working for Wetlands. These government-funded programs aim at restoring both natural and social capital, which are clearly the wave and the way of the future. They are also increasingly working with NGO implementers, private companies, and landowners in the Karoo, as we highlighted in two earlier posts (here and here). Teams, partnerships, and networks are essential here, given the complexity of the landscapes – both biophysical and political.

To close our trip in South Africa, we traveled to Cape Saint Francis, on the coast of the Eastern Cape, where our friends Richard Cowling and Shirley Pierce, who have lived there for more than 20 years, long ago founded a restoration project they dubbed FOSTER (short for Friends of the St Francis Nature Areas).

Richard, a top academic, communicator, and world expert on the ecology, biodiversity, and landscapes of South Africa has also worked closely with the WfW government programs elsewhere in the country, not only in the fynbos (the mega-diverse shrublands of the mediterranean-type climate region of the Cape) but also the karoo and subtropical thicket (on which, more below).

Richard Cowling and Shirley Pierce-Cowling in their adopted habitat, St Francis Bay. 2013.  

In and around Cape St Francis, and St Francis Bay, one of the main issue is Acacia cyclops (known in South Africa as rooikrans), one of many fast-growing acacias intentionally introduced from Australia 150 years ago for sand dune stabilization.

In 1994, Richard and Shirley took up the challenge of developing a conservation plan and implementation strategy for consolidating 230 ha of municipal land and existing protected areas into a network that would sustain – among other things – faunal movement. More than 50% of this was densely invaded with rooikrans; only 38 ha was officially proclaimed a nature reserve. It was a slow process. Rooikrans grows quicker and taller than the native plants. But they had a very strong motivation. Indeed, “as a result of its greater biomass and more flammable foliage, rooikrans increases fire hazard by several fold relative to uninvaded fynbos” says Richard.

Over 20 years, they achieved near total success in removal of seed-bearing alien plants through the generous funding from the World Wide Fund (WWF) and residents’ donations, but only on the 132 hectares of public lands where they could work, often with the enthusiastic help of school groups and volunteers who learned much along the way.

FOSTER restoration workers conducting follow-up removal of the alien invasive rooikrans, Acacia cyclops, in the Cape St Francis nature reserve. Photo. R.M. Cowling.

A learner from a local school enjoying the leaves of Brunsvigia gregaria (Amaryllidaceae) during an excursion organized by FOSTER. Photo. R.M. Cowling.

 

 

Brunsvigia gregaria in bloom; this species is popularly known as candelabra flower.  Cape St Francis, Apr 7, 2016.

But there were hundreds of hectares more to clear, both on public and private lands around the town. Then, in late 2012, a fire swept through, leaving severe damage and a wake-up call.

By that time, WfW was ready to help with restoration on private lands, provided that landowners contributed to the effort. The help from WfW and others much expanded FOSTER’s reach, and in only four years, some 1000 hectares of rooikrans were cleared from private lands in the area.

This of course dramatically reduced the township’s vulnerability to wildfire damage. As proof, when another massive wildfire swept through the area in January 2016, only three houses were destroyed. Notably, all three belonged to owners who had refused access to WfW workers seeking to eradicate rooikrans.

Other communities along the coast have taken notice and hopefully will follow the example of Cape St Francis.

Second landscape example: Kaboega farm

Finally, following Richard’s advice we drove two hours inland from Port Elisabeth, not too far from St Francis Bay, to visit a truly remarkable place where four different ecosystem types meet and intermingle in a property of only 6550 hectares: 1) fynbos, 2) the karoo desert, here at its southernmost limit, 3) the northernmost temperate rain forest fragments of the South East, of which the only important remnants are found in the Knysna region, and 4) subtropical thickets.

Outenieqwa-geelhout, or small-leaved yellowwood, Podocarpus falcatus. Outstanding specimen of the relict population growing near a perennial stream at Kaboega Farm.

What South Africans call subtropical thickets are in fact a remarkable tapestry of vegetation types, with as many as 116 distinct variants (Cowling et al. 2005). Of particular interest here is the so-called spekboom-dominated thicket, characterized by the spekboom (Portulacaria afra).

Fully mature spekboom, one of the largest individuals known

Spekboom-dominated thicket once flourished on approximately 1.4 million hectares (3.46 million acres), but today it occupies barely one-seventh of its former area. “The remainder has been degraded by over-exploitation, mainly through injudicious farming with angora goats……” (see the report Investing in Sustainability). However, spekboom is an extremely hardy succulent tree, remarkably fast-growing and readily propagated from cuttings, or even large stancheons.

This makes it attractive for large-scale restoration work. Indeed, it has been the focus of much attention from Working for Woodlands, another member of the Working-for family of government restoration programs. The manager and co-owners of Kaboega Farm, Ian and Sandra Ritchie, stopped all agricultural activity on their land 20 years ago, to allow the land to recover from an estimated 135 years of over-grazing by small livestock. They live instead by hosting visitors, including succulent plant lovers, drawn to this hotspot of Haworthias, and university groups led by Richard Cowling. Among other recent discoveries, Cowling and co-workers have shown that subtle difference in community-level frost tolerance can determine the boundaries between tightly packed biomes at Kaboega, where diversity is sky-high despite an average rainfall of just 300 mm per annum and frequent, extreme droughts.

Spekboom cuttings struggling to get going

Furthermore, Ian and Sandra Ritchie are attempting to restore swathes of spekboom thicket at strategic spots on their farm, as a part of an ambitious large-scale program with support of Working for Woodlands.

They plant spekboom cuttings, which over time create an enhanced micro-environment in an otherwise harsh and difficult environment for young plants, and thus try to kick-start the regeneration of the habitat, biological community, and ecosystem. Furthermore, spekboom traps large amounts of CO₂, and the general hope is that carbon credits can help finance large-scale restoration in the future. In the meantime, this is a remarkably attractive destination for nature-lovers.  In addition to the flora and landscapes, giraffe, kudu, and other game are added and allowed to roam free for the pleasure of visitors (and the owners). When numbers grow too high, however, there is a risk of exceeding carrying capacity, and some animals are captured for resale to other land-owners. This provides an additional income flow as game ranching linked to tourism and recreational hunting is increasingly popular in the region.

Portion of a thriving population of 28 South African giraffe or Cape giraffe (Giraffa giraffa giraffa) at Kaboega Farm. While some argue that giraffes are not native to the area, nearby millennial cave paintings indicate the contrary.

At this remarkable farm, science-based conservation and restoration are making progress in an attempt to enhance biodiversity conservation, tourism revenues, and ecosystem services of all kinds. Clearly, spekboom planting is not an all-in-one solution; for jumpstarting restoration and assisting regeneration in a complex landscape and land tenure situation like this one, where temperate forests, fynbos, thicket, and karoo shrublands all occur and interact, a landscape perspective on the challenges of ecological restoration is essential. We’ll be posting more on this challenge in the future.

South Africa 2. Toward a Restoration Culture? Good news from the Karoo

In this 4^th post from southern Africa, James and Thibaud Aronson report on a pioneering, science-based restoration project, the associated private restoration company, and also a nature reserve, all founded by one pair of scientists in Prince Albert, Western Cape province, South Africa.

Last October, posting from SW Australia, we reported on Gondwana Link and some of the activities of the Australasia chapter of SER. These are just two of the thousands of independent non-governmental groups of people working for joint environmental and social change around the world, as celebrated in Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken’s 2007 best-selling book dedicated to the “unnamed movement” to reimagine our relationship to the environment and one another. After a year and a half researching our book on arid and semi-arid land trees, and ecological restoration projects and programs in the world’s drylands, we still like our name for that “unnamed movement” Hawken referred to, namely a restoration culture for the 21^st century.

Opportunities for grassroots or combined bottom-up – top-down efforts and synergies abound in South Africa, with its outstanding research, technology, and capacity-building from academics, think tanks, not-for-profit organizations, and small companies offering restoration services and counsel. In our last post, we described a few Working for Wetlands programs and the participation of SAN Parks (the body that governs South African national parks) developing new ways to restore natural capital and social capital at the same time. Here we move to the vast central drylands of southern Africa, known very broadly as the Karoo.

As compared to other inland arid regions, landscape complexity here is enormous and, remarkably, ecotones, a.k.a. frontier zones are largely visible, if not intact.

A klipspringer (Oreotragus oreotragus) in the Swartberg, near Prince Albert. This small antelope, which occurs throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa, is unusual in that it walks on the tips of its hooves, an adaptation to its rocky habitat.

This huge inland semi-desert has at least four sub-regions, and borders to the southeast an archipelago of more than 100 recognized types of subtropical thicket, a plant formation forming a key transition zone, in ecological and evolutionary terms, intermediate between forest and savanna. According to plant ecologist Prof. Sue Milton and ornithologist Dr. Richard Dean,  the archeological and historical evidence indicate that the Karoo has been largely treeless for millennia. Trees are mostly prevented from growing in the Karoo, not only by the aridity (<200 mm precip./year), but also by shallow soils and cold winter temperatures. The Karoo was prehistorically grazed by nomadic ungulates that were hunted by hunter-gathers (San or Bushmen) and by transhumant pastoralists – the Khoe-khoe. Yet, a huge change came about when European colonization in the 18^th century brought wire fencing, deep drilling and wind pumps for extracting underground water. As Sue and Richard put it, “combined with a large demand for wool in Europe, this led to a boom in sheep farming and the development of rural villages, mostly dependent on ground-water.”

 

Southern African biomes, highlighting the large extent of the Karoo (yellow & brown), and the two sites we visited: Prince Albert and the Plains of Camdeboo. Modified from: http://www.plantzafrica.com/vegetation/vegimages/biomes800.jpg 

We traveled to Prince Albert, a small town in the Karoo, where we met up with our old friends and colleagues Sue Milton and Richard Dean, who are the co-owners of Renu-Karoo Veld Restoration and founders of the Wolwekraal Conservation and Research Organization, a unique research site Sue and Richard acquired in 2007, very near the edge of this isolated town. After nearly 40 years of hard work as international researchers and teachers, Sue and Richard decided to focus their considerable energy for the remainder of their careers to their town, and a community-based restoration and revitalization program for the Karoo. Unlike many NGOs in the “restoration movement” theirs is firmly grounded in science. Prior to launching Renu-Karoo, when they first moved to Price Albert, they continued teaching part-time in Cape Town – a full day’s drive away, and ran the Tierberg Karoo Research Station, a long-term ecological research site nearby, for many years. They have also written or edited the major ecological textbooks on the Karoo, both for basic researchers and managers. And indeed, it is a complex area in need of serious restoration work.

The plant nursery is a key component for all of Renu-Karoo’s activities, producing indigenous Karoo plants and plugs for landscaping and restoration. Availability of indigenous plants in the village has also gradually led to increased popularity of water-wise gardening and to an awareness of local plant diversity.

Sue Milton and Richard Dean surrounded by native and ornamental plants at the Renu-Karoo nursery.

One of the nursery’s 10 employees beginning the day with a round of watering.

As Sue and Richard explain:

“……the vast plains of the Karoo, the wooded drainage lines, the ancient gnarled trees of the dunes and mountains, and the elusive wildlife have been damaged by poor agricultural practices. The area is also currently threatened by development of solar and wind energy generation facilities, and uranium and gas mines that could convert the quiet Karoo into the ‘power factory’ of South Africa. A combination of conservation, education, and continuous active rehabilitation will be needed to enable future generations of people to benefit economically as well as recreationally and scientifically from this rocky and glorious desert landscape.”

When Sue and Richard established Renu-Karoo a decade ago, their goal was to grow and supply Karoo shrub and grass seeds and to provide consulting services on how to re-establish or “repair” Karoo vegetation. Through trial and error, research by students and interns, collaboration with other companies and not-for-profit organizations, and follow-up surveys of restoration and rehabilitation projects, they have produced valuable knowledge, made available both informally and in scientific publications. Additional services, such as contract growing of plugs and plants of never-before propagated veld (the South African name for the sparsely vegetated landscapes typical of the Karoo) plants have added to the interest and capabilities of the business. They also provide free environmental classes and natural history talks and walks to school children and adults. They are truly global citizens working locally to build a Restoration culture in their home, the Karoo.

As part of their work to advance the movement, and raise the bar in restoration and management work, Sue and Richard’s consulting work takes them to businesses and private farms throughout the Karoo. From Prince Albert, we traveled north- east, to visit one such place, the Plains of Camdeboo Nature Reserve, a privately-owned property on the edge of the Karoo.

A male vervet monkey (Chlorocebus pygerythrus) feeding in an Acacia, at Camdeboo National Park.

This nearly 9000-ha property once encompassed three game farms, which were severely overgrazed for a century, if not more. The properties were acquired by Vincent Mai, a South African who lives and works in New York City, and his wife Anne. They wanted to help preserve a piece of the Karoo where Vincent had grown up.

As it was clear that overgrazing in the past had seriously damaged the land, a South African conservation organization, the Wilderness Foundation, was invited to help. For the past six years, this foundation has been carrying out restoration work on the reserve. Their main focus is on eroded and impoverished soils, and they have undertaken a range of approaches, from grazing native Zulu cattle, to using agave stems and hay to block erosion gullies. A number of mammal species were also reintroduced. Angus Tanner, the indefatigable manager, showed us the range of their work on the reserve. Money and manpower is limited, and there are still many obstacles, but they are making great strides. They rely on Renu-Karoo for advice and seeds and technical advice. They are also reaching out to cooperate with the nearby township and their neighbors. Stitch by stitch, and farm by farm, the restoration culture is spreading in the Karoo.

Traditional Zulu cattle in the Plains of Camdeboo Nature Reserve. They both break up compacted soil and fertilize it as the managers move them around the property.

Two adjacent erosion gullies at the Plains of Camdeboo. The one on the right was plugged with a fence gabion and agave stems, in order to slow water flow and trap sediments. The gully on the left was not treated. A year later the difference between the two speaks for itself.