New drive curbs invasive plant growth
THE Duiwenhoks Conservancy, under the leadership of Dr John Thorne, has initiated a new drive to safeguard the roughly 3 000 hectare burn scar from invasive alien plant regrowth in the Vermaaklikheid area of the Garden Route.
Wildfires raged through the area in October and destroyed invaluable historical properties along the Duiwenhoks River.
Vermaaklikheid is situated near Witsand and close to the Duiwenhoks River.
Vermaaklikheid landowners affected by the fire have new hope to save their land from another generation of invasive alien plant infestation by preventing the area from being overrun by rooikrans growth.
The project has input from the Department of Environmental Affairs, Natural Resource Management, the Southern Cape Fire Protection Association and the Garden Route Environmental Forum, as well as the Duiwenhoks Conservancy.
“Increasingly, authorities and landowners alike are recognising the urgent need to reduce the presence of invasive alien plants on the landscape, the threat it presents and the benefit of an environment consisting of indigenous vegetation only,” said Cobus Meiring of the Southern Cape Landowners Initiative.
“The fires provide landowners with a clean slate to save their land.”
The strategy the conservancy wishes to adopt is to encourage landowners to develop invasive alien control plans for their properties, and to collectively deal with the problem.
Heading up a small group of conservancy team members, project manager Abe Pretorius was confident that the small team could make a huge difference in managing invasive alien plant regrowth by hand-pulling rooikrans plants as they emerge from the soil.
“In what is becoming the norm in a region staggering from one fire disaster to the next, invasive alien plants almost always contribute to the severity and intensity of wildfires in the Western and Eastern capes,” said Meiring.
Increasingly frequent out of control wildfires, driven by strong winds and fuelled by unnatural densities of invasive alien plants and dry biomass, are often defined as a direct result of a fast-changing climate.
About 3 000 hectares of land was completely destroyed by the fire, leaving behind a lunar landscape exposed to large-scale wind erosion and the already-present threat of large-scale invasive alien plant regrowth.