Plant Conservation Unit

Some exciting and hopeful news! 😃🌿💻

We are in the process of preserving and showcasing our historical photographic collections, in collaboration with UCT Libraries. The rePhotoSA website is currently still online and the collections can still be browsed, but will be migrated and updated, with the photographic collections greatly expanded.

We thank our citizen science community for their continued participation in our repeat photography project. As we migrate the rePhotoSA website, we ask that future repeat uploads make use of the Google Form link on the updated uploads page, as the usual upload function on the existing website has been deactivated. The updated upload page contains the relevant information: http://rephotosa.adu.org.za/upload_repeat.php

We will be in touch with all citizen scientists who have uploaded to rePhotoSA once our new site is live.

If you have any questions or comments, please email us at [email protected]. Thank you in advance for your patience.

rePhotoSA - The repeat photography project of southern African landscapes Thank you for your participation in rePhotoSA! We are in the process of migrating and updating our website, and would appreciate it if you would use the Google Form link below to capture the metadata and upload your repeats. We will be in touch with all citizen scientists who have uploaded to rePhot...

An article published in The Conversation this morning outlines the history and utility of repeat photography, and describes the rePhotoSA project and its successes.

READ HERE:

Repeat photos show change in southern African landscapes: a citizen science project Repeat photography has been used to document vegetation change in Africa since the 1950s; in the last 30 years there’s been an explosion of interest.

PCU Director, Prof. Timm Hoffman, recently appeared in UCT News for his work using repeat photography to understand changing landscapes in southern Africa. The article contains a brief explanation of repeat photography, and chronicles how Prof. Hoffman has used this method to provide evidence of land use change in a global biodiversity hotspot, how the rePhotoSA project involves citizen scientists to help obtain more repeats, and what a post-UCT fire future looks like for the PCU's repeat photography research.



Read the full article here:

A botanical journey through time Professor Timm Hoffman, who started the southern African citizen science repeat photography project, rePhotoSA, has been working with historical photographs of landscapes since he was a postdoctoral researcher in 1989.

A new paper by PCU researchers Dr Estelle Razanatsoa and Prof. Lindsey Gillson and colleagues, titled ‘Synergy between climate and human land-use maintained open vegetation in southwest Madagascar over the last millennium’ was published on 31 August 2021 in The Holocene.

The article provides new evidence on the environmental changes
that occurred in Madagascar during the Late-Holocene and explores some of the interacting effects of climate and human activities on the tropical dry forest of southwest Madagascar.

Well done to Estelle and Prof. Gillson!

NEW PAPER ALERT: Synergy between climate and human land-use maintained open vegetation in southwest Madagascar over the last millennium | Plant Conservation Unit A new article by several PCU researchers, including Dr Estelle Razanatsoa and Prof. Lindsey Gillson, titled ‘Synergy between climate and human land-use maintained open vegetation in southwest Madagascar over the last millennium’ was published on 31 August 2021 in The Holocene. The article is ...

PCU PhD candidate Gina Arena recently wrote an enlightening article for the SAEON newsletter highlighting the value of historical photographs to the long-term ecological research (LTER) network.

The article is well-placed, in the wake of the sudden loss of the historical landscape photograph collection (among others) in the fire that destroyed large portions of old buildings housing invaluable archival material on UCT's upper campus in April this year. The article makes a compelling case advocating for the increased use of repeat photography in supplementing existing long-term ecological data sets. Read the full article here:

Rethinking the value of historical photograph collections to the LTER network – SAEON eNews This article is dedicated to the late Dr Piet Roux, whose contribution to arid lands research in South Africa has been exceptional. Furthermore, his donation of historical data and photograph collections to the Plant Conservation Unit will continue to serve as irreplaceable baselines of data for ong...