How to build science-action partnerships for local land-use planning and management: Lessons from Durban, South Africa

The gap between scientific knowledge and implementation in the fields of biodiversity conservation, environmental management, and climate change adaptation has resulted in many calls from practitioners and academics to provide practical solutions responding effectively to the risks and opportunities of global environmental change, e.g., Future Earth. We present a framework to guide the implementation of science-action partnerships based on a real-world case study of a partnership between a local municipality and an academic institution to bridge the science-action gap in the eThekwini Municipal Area, South Africa. This partnership aims to inform the implementation of sustainable land-use planning, biodiversity conservation, environmental management, and climate change adaptation practice and contributes to the development of human capacity in these areas of expertise. Using a transdisciplinary approach, implementation-driven research is being conducted to develop several decision-making products to better inform land-use planning and management. Lessons learned through this partnership are synthesized and presented as a framework of enabling actions operating at different levels, from the individual to the interorganizational. Enabling actions include putting in place enabling organizational preconditions, assembling a functional well-structured team, and actively building interpersonal and individual collaborative capacity. Lessons learned in the case study emphasize the importance of building collaborative capacity and social capital, and paying attention to the process of transdisciplinary research to achieve more tangible science, management, and policy objectives in science-action partnerships. By documenting and reflecting on the process, this case study provides conceptual and practical guidance on bridging the science-action gap through partnerships

Analyses towards determining Madagascar’s place in global biogeography

The relationships of Madagascan plant and animal taxa have been the object of much fascination, Madagascar sharing numerous lineages with Africa, others with Asia, Australia, or the Americas, and many others being of uncertain relationships. In commonly accepted global regionalization schemata, Madagascar is treated together with Africa for animals, and with Africa, tropical Asia and the Pacific islands in the case of plants. Here we examine the similarities between the biotic assemblages of (i) tropical Africa, (ii) Madagascar, and (iii) the rest of the world, on a basic taxonomic level, considering the families of vascular plants and vertebrates as analysis units. The percentages of endemic families, families shared pair-wise between regions, or present in all three, are roughly similar between the two broad groups, though plant families with ranges limited to one region are proportionally fewer. In dendrograms and multidimensional scaling plots for different groups, Madagascar clusters together with Africa, Asia or both, and sometimes with smaller Indian Ocean Islands, but quite often (though not in plants) as a convincingly separate cluster. Our results for vertebrates justify the status of full zoogeographic region for Madagascar, though an equally high rank in geobotanical regionalization would mean also treating Africa and Tropical Asia as separate units, which would be debata­ble given the overall greater uniformity of plant assemblages. Beyond the Madagascan focus of this paper, the differences between plant and vertebrate clusters shown here suggest different levels of ecological plasticity at the same taxonomic level, with plant families being much more environmentally-bound, and thus clustering along biome lines rather than regional lines [Current Zoology 58 (3): 363-374, 2012]

Ancient Plant Lineages Endemic to Africa and Its Islands: An Analysis on the Distribution and Diversity

Although Africa and Madagascar host numerous endemic plant families and genera, there has been no attempt to use recent phylogenies in order to summarise information on their age or map their distribution and diversity. Here, we list 35 plant lineages endemic to Africa and its islands deemed to be older than 100 Mya, map their distribution, richness, and weighted endemism, and discuss intrinsic and extrinsic factors that may have facilitated their survival. High concentrations of ancient endemic lineages are found in the Cape and more broadly across southern Africa, in the Congolian rainforests, but also in East Africa and Madagascar, these last two areas sharing surprisingly many lineages. Africa and its islands host a highly distinctive assemblage of unique plant lineages, adapted to humid, mesic, dry, and in several cases fire-prone, environments. A better understanding of their history and ecology will facilitate their conservation in a changing climate

Land snail biogeography and endemism in south-eastern Africa: Implications for the Maputaland-Pondoland-Albany biodiversity hotspot.

Invertebrates in general have long been underrepresented in studies on biodiversity, biogeography and conservation. Boundaries of biodiversity hotspots are often delimited intuitively based on floristic endemism and have seldom been empirically tested using actual species distributions, and especially invertebrates. Here we analyse the zoogeography of terrestrial malacofauna from south-eastern Africa (SEA), proposing the first mollusc-based numerical regionalisation for the area. We also discuss patterns and centres of land snail endemism, thence assessing the importance and the delimitation of the Maputaland-Pondoland-Albany (MPA) biodiversity hotspot for their conservation. An incidence matrix compiled for relatively well-collected lineages of land snails and slugs (73 taxa in twelve genera) in 40 a priori operational geographic units was subjected to (a) phenetic agglomerative hierarchical clustering using unweighted pair-group method with arithmetic means (UPGMA), (b) parsimony analysis of endemicity (PAE) and biotic element analysis (BEA). Fulfilling the primary objective of our study, the UPGMA dendrogram provided a hierarchical regionalisation and identified five centres of molluscan endemism for SEA, while the PAE confirmed six areas of endemism, also supported by the BEA. The regionalisation recovers a zoogeographic province similar to the MPA hotspot, but with a conspicuous westward extension into Knysna (towards the Cape). The MPA province, centres and areas of endemism, biotic elements as well as the spatial patterns of species richness and endemism, support the MPA hotspot, but suggest further extensions resulting in a greater MPA region of land snail endemism (also with a northward extension into sky islands-Soutpansberg and Wolkberg), similar to that noted for vertebrates. The greater MPA region provides a more robustly defined region of conservation concern, with centres of endemism serving as local conservation priorities

Analysis of the diversity and distributional patterns of coleopteran families on a global scale

Moodley, Sandrini, Procheş, Şerban, Perera, Sandun J., Lubbe, Edrich, Ramdhani, Syd, Leschen, Richard A. B. (2022): Analysis of the diversity and distributional patterns of coleopteran families on a global scale. Zootaxa 5138 (5): 575-583, DOI: https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5138.5.

Factors potentially influencing the results on Mantel tests in our plots.

<p>Graphs exploring links between different plot-level variables and Mantel test r values for grassland (circles) and forest (diamonds) plots. Points above the dashed line indicate significant Mantel tests.</p

Summary of the most abundant indigenous and alien species recorded.

<p>Summary of the most abundant indigenous and alien species recorded.</p

How Do Alien Plants Fit in the Space-Phylogeny Matrix?

<div><p>Recent advances in the field of plant community phylogenetics and invasion phylogenetics are mostly based on plot-level data, which do not take into consideration the spatial arrangement of individual plants within the plot. Here we use within-plot plant coordinates to investigate the link between the physical distance separating plants, and their phylogenetic relatedness. We look at two vegetation types (forest and grassland, similar in species richness and in the proportion of alien invasive plants) in subtropical coastal KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The relationship between phylogenetic distance and physical distance is weak in grassland (characterised by higher plant densities and low phylogenetic diversity), and varies substantially in forest vegetation (variable plant density, higher phylogenetic diversity). There is no significant relationship between the proportion of alien plants in the plots and the strength of the physical-phylogenetic distance relationship, suggesting that alien plants are well integrated in the local spatial-phylogenetic landscape.</p></div

Forest-grassland comparisons.

<p>The two vegetation types are compared in terms of number of plant species, phylogenetic diversity, representation of alien species, and Mantel test r values (box-and-whisker plots).</p