Introduction to the South Africa and South Africa/Mozambique Expeditions
One of the most notable features of South African conservation is that their National Parks are now generating so much funding from nature-based tourism that there is a strong move to expand the areas under conservation management. In most other parts of the World there is an opposite trend with Protected Areas coming under increasing pressure to claim back areas for other land uses or with continual illegal hunting pressure. This trend to increase the areas under conservation in southern Africa has been encouraged by the Peace Parks Foundation (PPF) who have helped establish 14 Trans Frontier Conservation Areas (TFCA's) across southern African countries. One of these is the Greater Limpopo Trans-Frontier Park that links the Kruger National Park in South Africa (Kruger alone is over 2 million ha!), the Limpopo National Park in Mozambique and the Gonarezhou National Park in Zimbabwe. Some of the fence line between Kruger and Limpopo has been dropped so that there can be free movement of animals, and there have also been some initial translocations of animals from Kruger to Limpopo to speed up this process. South African National Parks (SANParks) who have the responsibility for biodiversity conservation have developed with Operation Wallacea, a monitoring programme of key indicator taxa for assessing changes in the Park as a result of elephant damage, fire management practices, impacts of alien species and climate change. The survey has been designed to collect bird data tied to habitat variables from 360 sites across the Park and these data can then be used in conjunction with habitat distributional data from satellite imagery to predict distributions of species from their core habitat requirements in adjacent protected areas such as the Limpopo National Park. A subset of these sites around the Mdluli Concession in the southern part of Kruger have been selected for year round monitoring of a range of other taxa (ants, spiders, beetles, bugs, amphibians, reptiles, mammals) in addition to the bird and habitat data to determine how the various Park management actions are affecting the diversity of these groups.
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Another of these TFCA's is on the southern border of Mozambique with South Africa where the objective is to provide a continuous conservation area linking the Mozambique Elephant Reserve with the iSimangaliso Wetland Reserve, Pongola Reserve, Ndumo and Tembe reserves in South Africa. Operation Wallacea have three teams working in this area; a team examining elephant ecology in Pongola Reserve, a team working on the crocodile and reptile communities of the iSimangaliso Reserve and a marine team gathering data on the reefs along the Mozambique coast along the edge of the proposed TFCA. This marine team is also working on a project entitled the Great East African Marine Transect that will compare reef fish and coral communities from Sodwana Bay in South Africa to Mombassa in Kenya and in the 2010 season will be starting on this project.
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