Outreach

Working with landowners in South Africa

In February 2023 a dynamic team of scientists and students, led by Senckenberg, set out on a field trip to the rugged and rural Baviaanskloof of the Eastern Cape of South Africa. This international team brings together partners from Senckenberg, Germany; Furman University, USA; Rhodes University, South Africa; and the University of Mpumalanga, South Africa with the aim to set up a long-term biomonitoring program in a mixed land use area. The aim of this project is to use various biomonitoring techniques to investigate how social, political, and environmental factors shape wildlife communities within mixed land-use areas in rural southern Africa.

The project was kickstarted across a 1950 km2 study area comprised of protected land and privately-owned farmlands in the Baviaanskloof, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. The Baviaanskloof is declared as an UNESCO World Heritage Site due to its cultural and natural diversity. Intensive livestock farming for several generations has caused widespread environmental degradation. Livestock farming is no longer economically sustainable and land owners have started looking towards agri- and eco-tourism and alternative farming practices. This project is using non-invasive, biomonitoring techniques including bioacoustics, camera traps, and DNA profiling to measure the spatial and temporal patterns of wildlife communities across the Baviaanskloof.

‘Citizen scientists’ in Germany monitor jaguars in Bolivia’s eastern lowlands  

You’ve heard of crowd-sourcing. How about crowd-conservation?…A team of biologists is using ‘citizen scientists’ to sort through thousands of photos and videos of wild animals captured by remote cameras, in an area of Bolivia threatened by deforestation.

Al Jazeera, 1.2.2022 

„Citizen science – der schlaue Schwarm“

Vorstellung des Bürgerwissenschafts-Projekts WildLIVE! in der Folge 24 des audible Podcast „Sag mal, Du als Biologin…“ mit Julia Schnetzer, Sebastian Lotzkat und  York Pijahn.