The elephant debate deals largely with population size, how elephant numbers change over time, how they may affect vegetation, and how their populations should be managed. Trends in elephant numbers frequently motivate ...

Beta diversity, defined as the variation or turnover in species composition, is important to the understanding of how ecological communities assemble. Studies of beta diversity during secondary forest succession may thus ...

Rehabilitation and revegetation of mined coastal sand dunes on the east coast of South Africa makes sense. It recovers ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration. The outcome of rehabilitation, which covers a third ...

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Conservation management approaches for elephants in southern Africa, and particularly in the Kruger National Park, have changed. Recently, Kruger’s managers adapted their approach from artificially manipulating elephant ...

Resources that can optimize survival are distributed unevenly across landscapes. I assumed that the distribution of these resources is reflected by landscape heterogeneity and that selection for areas with relatively high ...

A widely observed pattern in nature is a positive relationship between local abundance and spatial distribution. This study investigates this relationship amongst three taxa namely rodents, millipedes and trees on regenerating ...

To improve the efficacy of protected areas in conserving ecological processes, initiatives such as the megaparks for metapopulations strive to increase connectivity between small and often isolated protected areas. Increasing ...

Ecological restoration has the potential to stem the tide of habitat loss, fragmentation and transformation that are the main threats to global biological diversity and ecosystem services. Through this thesis, I aimed to ...