A seven-year research project, recently published in the international scientific journal Animal Conservation, has shown that using “scare lines” to keep birds away from trawl cables during trawl fishing can dramatically reduce seabird deaths. The research, which monitored trawl fishers off the coast of South Africa from 2006, showed that the use of the lines […]
Do Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) disadvantage fishermen? In a paper published in Nature Communications in August 2013, Dr Sven Kerwath (a research associate at UCT and scientist at the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries), postdoctoral fellow Dr Henning Winker, Dr Albrecht Götz of the Southern African Environmental Observation Network and Professor Colin Attwood of […]
The great Okavango Delta is fed by seasonal rains that fall in southern Angola, sending waters on a 1 200-kilometre journey to the basin that holds the Okavango. But with predictions of rising temperatures in the west of Southern Africa, will the waters still come? And will they be as massive and awe-inspiring, filling the […]
A postdoctoral student at the UCT Marine Research Institute (Ma-Re) was recently joint winner of a prestigious United Nations award, one of the 2013 SEED (Supporting Entrepreneurs for Sustainable Development) awards. Dr Hilkka Ndjaula’s Dried Fish Company (DFC) and its partner, the Women’s Enterprise Development Initiative (WEDI), aim to help Namibians attain food security and […]
Honours student Nicola Kuhn is assessing the vegetation in the Groot Winterhoek Wilderness Area (GWWA) as part of the Bergrivier Climate Knowledge Network (CKN). “This is one of the main catchment areas, so it is of interest to get a sense of its environmental history and see if it is functioning as it should since […]
