Themeda Eco Consulting

10/05/2018

A butterfly, a plantago, and a prairie. A story of how we inadvertently influence the natural world.

A complicated mix of an invasive species, a cattle ranch, and evolution.

02/05/2018

How does the veld compare to the prairies? I had a great conversation with three rangeland ecologists from the US and South Africa, which Chris Helzer has just posted on his excellent Prairie Ecology blog.

With this post, I’m finally getting around to something I’ve been contemplating for several years. Back in October, 2015, Alan Short sent me an email from South Africa. He’d been reading this blo…

20/11/2017

So the International Energy Agency has predicted 70% growth in renewable energy in Africa over the next five years. Considering the IEA's dismal history of severely underestimating renewables for the last quarter-century, we can probably comfortably expect double or triple that.

Breaking all-time records, renewables currently account for two thirds of global net capacity additions, according to one of several reports about how renewable energy is powering ahead. The trend is set to continue. “All renewables will grow at double the velocity of fossil fuels within the next fi...

08/05/2017

African Parks is looking for a project manager in Zambia. Details below

02/05/2017

Citing sources is one of the fundamentals of evidence-based communication - if you state something as fact, then you need a source to back up your fact.

But lazy citation - where writers simply tack citations on to the end of a sentence to give their opinions legitimacy - is a problem that is often hard to detect. Readers have to parse through every citation (often dense technical literature) to determine whether the source actually supports the writer's claims. Lazy citing isn't necessarily malicious, but it is pernicious.

This study used a stroke of genius to quantify the problem of lazy citing, by looking for instances of a common misspelling of a common term in ecology, the Shannon-Wiener index. It's been so often misspelled as Shannon-WEAVER that the misspelling has become entrenched in ecological literature by writers who couldn't be bothered to go back to the original paper.

The Shannon–Wiener index is a popular nonparametric metric widely used in ecological research as a measure of species diversity. We used the Web of Science database to examine cases where papers published...

27/02/2017

Great article by Nico Smit on calculating grazing and browsing capacity for wildlife.
http://www.wildliferanching.com/content/grazing-capacity-game

27/02/2017

Field managers needed for baboons in Cape Town.

VACANCY: FIELD MANAGER POSITIONS AT HWS

Human Wildlife Solutions is currently looking for Field managers again for their baboon management programme.

CLOSING DATE: 13 March 2017

Contact: Ziggy Rode, [email protected]

See attached advert for more information.

09/12/2016

New batch of practical books for managing your natural resources.

26/10/2016

Prairies are often defined as plant communities dominated by grasses, sedges, and wildflowers. However, prairies are also home to thousands of animal species, not to mention countless varieties of…

21/10/2016

Tree planting programs can end up doing more harm than good if they damage an existing ecosystem

http://www.themedaeco.co.za/blog/when-is-reforestation-a-bad-idea

The camera pans over a vast, treeless plain, mountains hazy in the distance, suitably stirring music setting the tone. A small child appears, doing childlike stuff. A beat, for the viewer to drink in...

19/10/2016

Plants compete for limiting resources like nitrogen or water, creating many different niches where different species can co-exist. If you remove a limitation (for example, by adding fertiliser) biodiversity declines. This sounds counter-intuitive, but it's been supported by decades of research and a recent international experiment across several continents.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v537/n7618/abs/nature19324.html

Niche dimensionality provides a general theoretical explanation for biodiversity—more niches, defined by more limiting factors, allow for more ways that species can coexist. Because plant species compete for the same set of limiting resources, theory predicts that addition of a limiting resource eli...

19/10/2016

Well done Kevin!
http://ndaba-online.ukzn.ac.za/UkzndabaStory/163/ukzn-academic-contributes-to-feature-in-prestigious-international-journal

Professor Kevin Kirkman of the School of Life Sciences has contributed to a feature on grassland diversity in the journal Nature.