Assessing essential biodiversity indicators for biological invasions in South African National Parks

Core team member: Sabrina Kumschick, Llewellyn Foxcroft

Project Background

There are > 800 alien species in South African National Parks (SANParks). A monitoring programme was developed to determine trends in the invasion, spread and management of alien species using a set of indicators for SANParks. Advances in developing international indicators (e.g. Latombe et al. 2017) and the production of indicators for South Africa (Wilson et al. 2018) and the production of a report on ‘The status of biological invasions and their management in South Africa’ (van Wilgen & Wilson 2018) has highlighted the importance of conservation agencies to follow suite.

The SANParks estate includes 19 national parks and covers an area of 3.9 million hectares. While the management of alien species has been ongoing in SANParks for a number of decades, there has been no detailed assessment of the status of invasions. Data were provided for the national status report but these were based on a rapid collation of what was available and have not been further examined.

This study aims to assess the status in SANParks against the indicators developed for the national status report as well as other systems such as those developed as part of ‘A vision for global monitoring of biological invasions’ (Essential Variables for Invasion Monitoring). It aims to analyse which indicators are most readily available, and to estimate the effort, resource and data needs to fill the gaps.

Further Reading
  1. Latombe et al. (2017) A vision for global monitoring of biological invasions. Biological Conservation 213: 295–308.
  2. van Wilgen, B.W. and Wilson, J.R. (eds.) (2018) The status of biological invasions and their management in South Africa in 2017. South African National Biodiversity Institute, Kirstenbosch and DST-NRF Centre of Excellence for Invasion Biology, Stellenbosch.
  3. Wilson, J.R., Faulkner, K.T., Rahlao, S.J., Richardson, D.M., Zengeya, T.A. and Van Wilgen, B.W., 2018. Indicators for monitoring biological invasions at a national level. Journal of applied ecology, 55(6), pp.2612-2620.
  4. Foxcroft et al. (2017) Biological invasions in South African National Parks. Bothalia 47(2), a2158.
Key Contacts

Dr Sabrina Kumschick e: sabrinakumschick@sun.ac.za
Dr Llewellyn Foxcroft: c: 082 908 2676 e: Llewellyn.foxcroft@sanparks.org

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