The JRS Biodiversity Foundation joins the global philanthropic community in concern regarding the negative impacts of COVID-19 upon the sectors and issues that we fund. The Foundation has elected to make a special series of awards to secure the scientific capacity for biodiversity monitoring in select African parks that are threatened by revenue loss during the pandemic. This investment in the work of South African National Parks is one of four special awards being made for 2020-2021.

South African National Parks (SANParks) manages a system of 19 national parks in 7 of the 9 provinces of South Africa. This park system includes 3 World Heritage sites spanning across 6 national parks, 5 parks which are integral components of transfrontier conservation areas and 6 marine protected areas, covering just over 4 million hectares on land and almost 370,000 heactares at sea. This represents 67% of the state-owned protected areas and 22% of state–managed protected areas. Beyond biodiversity and cultural heritage protection and management, SANParks’s public good mandate includes providing opportunities for a diversity of meaningful nature-based experiences as well as contributing to socio-economic development for communities around parks. SANParks generates approximately 80% of its operating budget from its ecotourism business; fulfilment of its holistic conservation mandate is thus heavily reliant on thriving and sustainable tourism operations.

Effective conservation integrates management actions and rigorous scientific research. SANParks generates and curates a diversity of long-term biodiversity datasets and facilitates effective conservation through their scientists and biotechnicians, who bridge the gap between science and management and with diverse external stakeholders. Revenue losses due to COVID-19 have significantly affected science and research making datasets vulnerable to interruption and loss. The Scientific Services department is currently operating at critically low capacity, particularly in terms of field-work ability in the arid and marine ecosystems, due to budget cuts and a freeze on vacancies and contract renewals for the foreseeable future. Three key biodiversity projects, all with significant informatics components, have received JRS funding to ensure continued employment of key staff and critical biodiversity data collection for two years: Golden Gate Highlands National Park, Mountain Zebra National Park, and Kruger National Park.

Golden Gate Highlands National Park is paleontologically unique with the oldest recorded fossil dinosaur eggs containing fetal skeletons from the upper Triassic period. The park makes a significant national contribution to the protection of afromontane and alpine grasslands, ravine forests, lichens, and high-altitude wetlands. Rare and endangered fauna withing the park include Cape and bearded vultures, bald ibis, oribi, and sungazer lizards. The park is also a critical “water factory” for South Africa. Research and monitoring efforts focus on describing the unique biodiversity, supporting habitat and wetland restoration, understanding key ecological drivers such as fire regimes and climate change, and supporting appropriate game management.

The appointment of a resident biotechnician and establishment of a small research facility have enabled expansion of biodiversity research, national and international research collaborations, and support capacity development through tertiary research. The JRS award will ensure the continued employment of the biotechnician, who is also a PhD student, and ensure stability and continuation of the long-term data collection which supports montane grassland ecosystems management in southern Africa.

Originally created to protect a remnant population of Cape mountain zebra, Mountain Zebra National Park now protects a range of vegetation communities and large herbivore populations characteristic of the Eastern Cape’s midland landscapes. The park’s purpose has grown beyond being a species-focused park to conserving plants, animals, ecological processes, landscapes, and unique cultural assets. Long-term research and monitoring were initiated in the 1980s to understand the threat of vegetation homogenization through grazing, and work to understand plant-herbivore-carnivore interactions in these semi-arid environments is still ongoing. Reintroduction of lion and cheetah in the past decade is associated with intense monitoring and management, including annual aerial censuses and demographic surveys of key predator and herbivore species. Mountain Zebra’s biotechnician, who is also a graduate student, supports research and extensive monitoring within the park and beyond.

The JRS award will allow Mountain Zebra National Park to retain their biotechnician and reinstate large vertebrate surveys, which were suspended in 2020 due to the pandemic.

Kruger National Park (KNP) houses the Skukuza Biological Reference Collection, a collection and archive with more than 24,500 biological specimens collected from across the park. Established in the 1950s, it has some specimens dating back to 1931. Preserved specimens have locality data, collection dates, habitat descriptions, and other relevant information. In August 2020, the Skukuza’s curator retired after 32 years in the position.

The funding from JRS will be used to fund a short-term bioinformatics support position to assist the soon to be appointed curator of the Skukuza reference collection and work with KNP’s Knowledge Support manager to inventory and assemble key datasets, geo-reference collections, cross-reference and update species nomenclature, ‘clean’ and standardise data, and coordinate data-sharing. This will help reduce a critical biodiversity resource capacity gap for important long-term biodiversity data sets.

Dr. Stef Freitag-Ronaldson has worked for SANParks for 23 years in varying roles as scientist, environmental manager, and science manager. Stef’s passion is ensuring that wild spaces remain for people into the future, that the next generation of conservation scientists are given space to grow and thrive, and that various forms of knowledge and understanding are incorporated into the way protected area management decisions are made.