Your Restoration Stories
Wells for Zoë – Enyazini, Mzimba District, Malawi ReStory narrator: Ken Coetzee (Conservation Management Services; www.conservationmanagementservices.co.za) Erosion type: head cut
Read more
The Berg and Breede Riparian Rehabilitation Programme (est. 2013) is one of the largest active riparian rehabilitation projects in South Africa. Initiated by the Department of Environmental Affairs and Development Planning, the project has planted approximately 2.16 million plants since its inception within an area of 18 ha. The primary aims of this project is to improve ecological functioning of the river, to create jobs (through EPWP) and to buffer the effects of climate change (flooding). The programme has involved over 30 landowners over the years, as key partners in their endeavours and Intaba Environmental Services has been one of the main service providers in this programme.
Read more
ReStory narrator: Donovan Kotze This report was originally compiled for the Gourtiz Cluster Biosphere Reserve (GCBR), Riversdale. Background Owing especially
Read more
Apart from the obvious global challenges such as climate change and ensuring future food security in a rapidly changing environment, decreasing global biodiversity is also a very serious challenge.
Read more
In 2010, Barry Meijer returned from the United States where he had lived for the last 35 years. He’d had great memories of his time in the army at Oudtshoorn so he decided to buy a farm there. Barry had grown up on a farm near Eshowe and, while running his garden services business in California, he had done some sideline farming of oats and barley, so he knew a little about farming. When he started farming at Meijer’s Rust in Meiringspoort near the town of De Rust he continued what had been done there before and if he needed any advice, he asked the neighbours.
Read moreUsing goats to control invasive alien plants could provide an economic opportunity for small livestock farmers in South Africa. Goat farmers can become entrepreneurs that run alien plant clearing goat herds and so become indispensable in the fight to control and eradicate invasive plants. There is also the great advantage of the goats being a lucrative source of meat and skins with a ready market. We have invasive alien plants in almost every part of South Africa and if properly managed, goats for aliens could become economically important in smaller rural communities.
Read more
These alien trees invade the wetlands, changing both the plant composition and the soil surface stability. This ultimately results in canalisation and increased flow of the water out of the wetland as well as the formation of severe erosion head-cuts, which voraciously eat back into the less protected wetland substrate with each flood. The peat wetlands then begin to suffer the loss of their function as storage systems for water and carbon.
Read more
The outline and meaning of the image in the mirror become clearer like the appearance of the protective rocks, as if from nowhere, in the dissolving morning mist. Buffelsbaai and its swallows are but a microcosm of who we are and what we desire as a people.
Read more
The community of Vanwyksdorp, a little agricultural village in the heart of the arid Little Karoo, was stuck in a status quo of depopulation of rural agriculture, unemployment, poverty and helplessness. Vanwyksdorp has a good school but the situation was exacerbated by the annual exodus of school leavers, full of knowledge and expectations, only to find a world of closed doors and very few or no opportunities.
Read more
Peninsula Granite Fynbos is wholly confined to the City of Cape Town and found only on the lower, more fertile slopes of Table Mountain on the Cape Peninsula. Peninsula Granite Fynbos is perhaps best symbolised on Table Mountain by the Silver Tree, but is also incredibly rich in plant species and contains nine endemic species, all threatened with extinction: Unistem Aristea (Critically Endangered), Granite Cape Flax (Critically Endangered), Crown-climbers Friend (Rare), Small-flowered doll-rose (Rare), Spreading Everfig (Vulnerable), and Bakoven Brightfig (Vulnerable). Peninsula Granite Fynbos was also the home of the Wynberg Conebush and Table Mountain Widow Reed, but these species have been wiped out as a result of housing and agricultural developments and are now extinct.
Read more