Surrounded by the beautiful Outeniqua Mountains and situated within deeply green pine plantations, the NMMU campus at Saasveld provided a perfect retreat from the hustle and bustle of everyday life for 21 students from all over southern Africa. The students had gathered in this tranquil place near George, South Africa, to participate in the very first SAPECS winter school held from the 30th of June to the 4th of July 2014. The main goal of the winter school was to develop the capacity of these new scholars in the field of social-ecological systems to plan, execute and interpret their research. [...]

A new popular science publication has been produced by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, entitled "Applying resilience thinking - Seven principles for building resilience in social-ecological systems". This is a popular summary of the Cambridge University book "Principles for Building Resilience: Sustaining Ecosystem Services in Social-Ecological Systems" (2014). This book, in turn, expands on the comprehensive review "Towards principles for enhancing the resilience of ecosystem services" by Reinette Biggs et al., published in the journal Annual Reviews of Environment and Resources in 2012. Many SAPECS-affiliated researchers were involved in the process of compiling the review, book and popular summary. For more [...]

To compete for a burgeoning tourist market looking for a great wildlife experience,  protected areas (particularly more commercially driven privately-owned ones) often over-stock on charismatic species. But do more charismatic species equate to more visitors, and more revenue? In a paper recently published in the journal Ecological Applications, and featured more popularly in the magazine “Conservation”, Kristi Maciejewski and Graeme Kerley from the SAPECS-affiliated Protected Areas Project find that this is not necessarily the case.  In their study, carried out in the Eastern Cape, higher elephant densities did not translate to increased elephant sightings, nor increased revenue.  The researchers argue that, paradoxically, [...]

A very hot and humid Grahamstown welcomed more than twenty researchers and PhD students to the 4th meeting of the SAPECS Working Groups between 27th and 30th January 2014, held at Rhodes University. Existing working groups met to further discussions and collaborations that were initiated last year, and new working groups were formed to respond to emerging research gaps identified by the wider SAPECS community. Three full days of workshopping were complemented with a fieldtrip to Grahamstown’s commonages, which represent fascinating examples of social-ecological systems that provide a variety of ecosystem services to local people (like firewood, grazing for cattle, [...]

For two years, PhD students Vanessa Masterson and Maike Hamann have explored the links between ecosystem services, human well-being and sense of place in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. At the local scale, Vanessa has spent five months in the Centane district on the Wild Coast, conducting interviews and focus group discussions with villagers and migrant workers about their connection to the landscape, small-scale farming and the use of natural resources. She has also used participatory methods including photovoice and community mapping to characterize the sense of place of small-scale farmers and their migrant family networks, and explored [...]