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A biome is a biogeographical unit consisting of a biological community that has formed in response to the physical environment in which they are found and a shared regional climate. Biomes may span more than one continent. Biome is a broader term than habitat and can comprise a variety of habitats.
A savanna or savannah is a mixed woodland-grassland ecosystem characterised by the trees being sufficiently widely spaced so that the canopy does not close. The open canopy allows sufficient light to reach the ground to support an unbroken herbaceous layer consisting primarily of grasses. According to Britannica, there exists four savanna forms; savanna woodland where trees and shrubs form a light canopy, tree savanna with scattered trees and shrubs, shrub savanna with distributed shrubs, and grass savanna where trees and shrubs are mostly nonexistent.
The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, is a multi-campus South African public research university situated in the northern areas of central Johannesburg. It is more commonly known as Wits University or Wits. The university has its roots in the mining industry, as do Johannesburg and the Witwatersrand in general. Founded in 1896 as the South African School of Mines in Kimberley, it is the third oldest South African university in continuous operation.
Pastoralism is a form of animal husbandry where domesticated animals are released onto large vegetated outdoor lands (pastures) for grazing, historically by nomadic people who moved around with their herds. The animal species involved include cattle, camels, goats, yaks, llamas, reindeer, horses and sheep.
Fire ecology is a scientific discipline concerned with natural processes involving fire in an ecosystem and the ecological effects, the interactions between fire and the abiotic and biotic components of an ecosystem, and the role as an ecosystem process. Many ecosystems, particularly prairie, savanna, chaparral and coniferous forests, have evolved with fire as an essential contributor to habitat vitality and renewal. Many plant species in fire-affected environments require fire to germinate, establish, or to reproduce. Wildfire suppression not only eliminates these species, but also the animals that depend upon them.
George Evelyn Hutchinson was a British ecologist sometimes described as the "father of modern ecology." He contributed for more than sixty years to the fields of limnology, systems ecology, radiation ecology, entomology, genetics, biogeochemistry, a mathematical theory of population growth, art history, philosophy, religion, and anthropology. He worked on the passage of phosphorus through lakes, the chemistry and biology of lakes, the theory of interspecific competition, and on insect taxonomy and genetics, zoo-geography and African water bugs. He is known as one of the first to combine ecology with mathematics. He became an international expert on lakes and wrote the four-volume Treatise on Limnology in 1957.
Regime shifts are large, abrupt, persistent changes in the structure and function of ecosystems, the climate, financial systems or other complex systems. A regime is a characteristic behaviour of a system which is maintained by mutually reinforced processes or feedbacks. Regimes are considered persistent relative to the time period over which the shift occurs. The change of regimes, or the shift, usually occurs when a smooth change in an internal process (feedback) or a single disturbance triggers a completely different system behavior. Although such non-linear changes have been widely studied in different disciplines ranging from atoms to climate dynamics, regime shifts have gained importance in ecology because they can substantially affect the flow of ecosystem services that societies rely upon, such as provision of food, clean water or climate regulation. Moreover, regime shift occurrence is expected to increase as human influence on the planet increases – the Anthropocene – including current trends on human induced climate change and biodiversity loss. When regime shifts are associated with a critical or bifurcation point, they may also be referred to as critical transitions.
The Damara woolly bat is a nocturnal insectivorous species of vesper bat in the family Vespertilionidae found in Africa. This species typically has reddish brown fur on its back and white fur on its abdomen. Its natural habitat is moist savanna, although it has also been shown to inhabit woodlands and coastal forests. These bats typically weight about 10 g, and have a low aspect ratio, as well as low wing loading.
Brian Harrison Walker is a scientist specialized in ecological sustainability and resilience in socio-ecological systems.
The Upper Midwest forest–savanna transition is a terrestrial ecoregion that is defined by the World Wildlife Fund. An oak savanna plant community located in the Upper Midwest region of the United States, it is an ecotone between the tallgrass prairies to the west and the temperate deciduous forests to the east. A part of the Upper Mississippi River basin, it is considered endangered with less than 5% of the original ecosystem remaining intact, due mostly to overgrazing and conversion to agriculture.
Himla (Himladevi) Soodyall is a South African geneticist involved in finding some of the oldest human genetic lines, mainly focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa. Her work on DNA has pointed to southern Africa as the most likely geographic region of origin of the human species.
The South African Environmental Observation Network (SAEON) is a science network of people, organisations and, most importantly observation platforms, that perform Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) in South Africa and its surrounding oceans. The SAEON is of global importance as an innovative approach in ecology to understand environmental change and to determine the impact of anthropogenic forces at multiple scales but it is a remarkably complex challenge to statistically discern between ubiquitous natural variability and exogenous forcing. The SAEON constitutes a national government response to the World Summit on Sustainable Development (Earth Summit 2002) and is a component of the GEO (Group on Earth Observations). The SAEON has become the leader in environmental science and observation in South Africa, but has been criticised for taking a long time to establish, a situation which was inevitable in view of SAEON's multiple stakeholder corps. It has also been raised that the cost of replicated experimental treatments across SAEON sites will be high.
Mediterranean forests, woodlands, and scrub is a biome defined by the World Wide Fund for Nature. The biome is generally characterized by dry summers and rainy winters, although in some areas rainfall may be uniform. Summers are typically hot in low-lying inland locations but can be cool near colder seas. Winters are typically mild to cool in low-lying locations but can be cold in inland and higher locations. All these ecoregions are highly distinctive, collectively harboring 10% of the Earth's plant species.
Lyn Wadley is an honorary professor of archaeology, and also affiliated jointly with the Archaeology Department and the Institute for Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Woody plant encroachment is a natural phenomenon characterised by the increase in density of woody plants, bushes and shrubs, at the expense of the herbaceous layer, grasses and forbs. It predominantly occurs in grasslands, savannas and woodlands and can cause biome shifts from open grasslands and savannas to closed woodlands. The term bush encroachment refers to the expansion of native plants and not the spread of alien invasive species. It is thus defined by plant density, not species. Bush encroachment is often considered an ecological regime shift and can be a symptom of land degradation. The phenomenon is observed across different ecosystems and with different characteristics and intensities globally.
Dr John Frederick Vicars Phillips FRSE FRSS FLS was a 20th-century South African botanist. He was an advocate of fire ecology theories.
Salome Maswime is a South African clinician and global health expert. She is an Obstetrician and Gynaecologist and the Head of Global Surgery at the University of Cape Town. She advocates for women's health rights, equity in surgical and maternal care, and providing adequate health services to remote and underserved populations. She advises and consults for many institutions, including the World Health Organization. In 2017, she was honored with the Trailblazer and Young Achiever Award. She is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa.
Phoebe L. Zarnetske is a community ecologist and associate professor at Michigan State University. Her work focuses on the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that shape natural communities across multiple spatial scales.
The Guineo-Congolian region is a biogeographical region in Africa straddling the Equator and stretching from the Atlantic Ocean through the Congo Basin to the Congo / Nile divide in Rwanda and Burundi. Formerly, this region was largely covered in rain forest, on both well-drained sites and in swamp forests, but little undisturbed primary forest now remains, having been replaced in many areas by savanna and secondary-growth forest.
Irvy (Igle) Gledhill is a South African physicist at the University of Witwatersrand, School of Mechanical, Industrial & Aeronautical Engineering, in Johannesburg.
References
- 1 2 "ORCID". orcid.org. Retrieved 10 February 2019.
- 1 2 3 "Mercer Award" (PDF). ESA. Retrieved 10 February 2019.
- 1 2 3 4 "Sally Archibald | PhD | University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg | wits | School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences". ResearchGate. Retrieved 10 February 2019.
- ↑ "Sally.Archibald@wits.ac.za - Wits University". www.wits.ac.za. Retrieved 12 February 2019.
- ↑ "Sally Archibald - Google Scholar Citations". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 10 February 2019.
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