Okavango Delta, Botswana

The Okavango Crocodile Monitoring Program (OCMP) has been running since the Okavango Crocodile Research Group from the University of Stellenbosch ended their project in 2006.The complete database for both research projects is held by the OCMP and continually updated as new crocodiles are captured. To date the database contains over 2000 crocodiles, each of which has the corresponding GPS location and detailed morphological data. This is one of the largest databases of wild captured Nile crocodiles in the world and provides an excellent platform from which a number of current scientific studies are running, including reassessment of population status and health including recruitment and nesting patterns, long-term growth rates in the wild, isotope and urine analysis to assess heavy metal content, and assessment of farm-release successes. The OCMP has also captured crocodiles in the Okavango catchment area in Angola and has discovered what appears to be a fairly healthy recruitment upstream from the Okavango River. While current capture efforts are not as intensive as they were in the past, the strategy of targeting specific size classes will certainly improve our understanding of growth rates and movements of sub-adult and adult crocodiles. This presentation will summarize the research findings to date, discuss present work being conducted and touch on future expectations, including addressing issues of Human/crocodile conflict.

Tourism industry is one of the fastest growing industries globally, with an economic contribution that is unquestionable in both developed and developing countries. However, the growth in tourism is also associated with a growth in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the tourism value chain, worsening the disaster of climate change. The tourism industry is dependent on the climate in many settings. To understand the current and future of the tourism industry, in the context of climate change, it is critical to understand the perceptions, knowledge and attitude of the tourism industry's main stakeholders, the tourists. This paper examines the stated aspects in the context of the Okavango Delta, Botswana. The study made use of an online survey, involving 155 tourists across the world, and secondary data. Analysis of data was done using QuestionPro analytics, Microsoft Excel ToolPak and Content Analysis. The results show that tourists are increasingly becoming more knowledgeable about climate change disaster. However, some practices and actions by tourists contribute towards the build-up of GHG emissions that drive climate change disaster. Tourists felt that climate change was worsened by ignorance, lack of education and poor global political leadership. Tourists believe that climate change is a threat to the water flow in the Okavango Delta, which has a negative effect on flora and fauna, as evidenced by the decline in birdlife species and other animal populations over the years. The study recommends increased environmental awareness interventions among tourism role players to foster greater climate resilience and more research to cover the knowledge gaps.

We examine the links between geomorphological processes, specific landscape features, surface water drainage, and the creation of suitable habitats for hominins. The existence of mosaic (i.e., heterogeneous) habitats within hominin site landscape reconstructions is typically explained using models of the riverine and gallery forest settings, or the pan or lake setting.We propose a different model: the Tectonic Landscape Model (TLM), where tectonic faulting and volcanism disrupts existing pan or river settings at small-scales (∼10e25 km). Our model encompasses the interpretation of the landscape features, the role of tectonics in creating these landscapes, and the implications for hominins. In particular, the model explains the underlying mechanism for the creation and maintenance of heterogeneous habitats in regions of active tectonics. We illustrate how areas with faulting and disturbed drainage patterns would have been attractive habitats for hominins, such as ustralopithecus, and other fauna. Wetland areas are an important characteristic of surface water disturbance by fault activity; herefore we examine the tectonically-controlled Okavango Delta (Botswana) and the Nylsvley wetland (South Africa) as modern
examples of how tectonics in a riverine setting significantly enhance the faunal and floral biodiversity. While tectonic landscapes may not have been the only type of attractive habitats to hominins, we propose a suite of landscape, faunal, and floral indicators, which when recovered together suggest that site environments may have been influenced by tectonic and/or volcanic activity while hominins were present. For the fossil sites, we interpret the faulting and landscapes around australopithecine-bearing sites of the Middle Awash (Ethiopia) and Makapansgat, Taung, and Sterkfontein (South Africa) to illustrate these relationships between landscape features and surface water bodies. Exploitation of tectonically active landscapes may explain why the paleoenvironmental signals, anatomy, diets, as well as the fauna associated with Australopithecus appear largely heterogeneous through time and space. This hypothesis is discussed in light of potential preservation and time-averaging effects which may affect patterns visible in the fossil record. The model, however, offers insight into the landscape processes of how such habitats are formed. The landscape features and range of habitat conditions, specifically the wetter, down-dropped plains and drier, uplifted flanks persist in close proximity for as long as the fault motion continues. The Tectonic Landscape Model provides an alternative explanation of why mixed habitats may be represented at certain sites over longer timescales.

Abstract and Keywords
Management of sub-Saharan protected areas is at its peak, with most countries having signed up to international conventions aimed at protecting the natural environment and collectively managing political threats that are likely to emanate from other states’ interest to harness cross-border environmental resources. These conservation efforts however are at a broader perspective that does not cater for the nuances at varying scales of environmental resources conservation and management. This article looks at the micro scale of resources management and assesses conservation of landscape at a protected world heritage area to illustrate an existing gap that needs to be addressed by accounting for each and every category of resources found in any protected landscape. To illustrate this phenomenon this article discusses insights from two protected areas of world heritage
status in southern Africa: Ngorongoro Crater Conservation Park World Heritage site in Tanzania and Okavango Delta World Heritage site in Botswana.

Keywords: suffocated heritage; protected areas; sub-Saharan Africa; world heritage processes; Okavango Delta, Botswana; Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania

Climate shifts at decadal scales can have environmental consequences, and therefore, identifying areas that act as environmental refugia is valuable in understanding future climate variability. Here we illustrate how, given appropriate geohydrology, a rift basin and its catchment can buffer vegetation response to climate signals on decadal timescales , therefore exerting strong local environmental control. We use time-series data derived from Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) residuals that record vegetation vigour, extracted from a decadal span of MODIS images, to demonstrate hydrogeological buffering. While this has been described previously it has never been demonstrated via remote sensing and results in relative stability in vegetation vigour inside the delta, compared to that outside. As such the Delta acts as a regional hydro-refugium. This provides insight, not only to the potential impact of future climate in the region, but also demonstrates why similar basins are attractive to fauna, including our ancestors, in regions like eastern Africa. Although vertebrate evolution operates on time scales longer than decades, the sensitivity of rift wetlands to climate change has been stressed by some authors, and this work demonstrates another example of the unique properties that such basins can afford, given the right hydrological conditions. Rift basins and associated wetlands may offer attractive habitats and their role in human evolution has been stressed by several authors 1–4. The Okavango Delta is the largest wetland in southern Africa and renowned for its high floral and faunal biodiversity 5. It covers an area of over 40,000 square km and consists of a smooth, (relief ≤2 m; slope 1:3400) conically-shaped, alluvial fan located on the Cubango-Okavango River which feeds a network of distributary channels and flanking swamps that form the Delta itself 6,7. While more accurately an alluvial megafan (or fan delta) rather than a delta we preserve the current terminology to avoid confusion. Located in the Kalahari Basin, the region has been subject to sedimentation throughout the Cenozoic, and was once at the centre of palaeo-lake Makgadikgadi 8–12 , prior to its drainage as a result of continued tectonic activity associated with the westward propagation of the East African Rift and river capture by the Zambezi River 10,13,14. The Delta is now located in an asymmetric graben, demarcated by a series of sub-parallel faults, including the Thamalakane Fault and is in-filled with at least 300 m of sediment deposited sometime in the last 1 Ma 10,15–17. Podgorski and colleagues 12 report a combination of electromagnetic, borehole and seismic data and suggest that this sediment fill consists of palaeo-megafans in the Okavango Basin overlain, by palaeo-lake Makgadikgadi deposits and the current delta/megafan. Recent renewed movements, post the palaeo-lake, along the Thamalakane and Kunyere faults now separate the Okavango and Makgadikgadi basins 10. A series of topographic cross-sections illustrate the geomorphological features of the Delta and wider basin. The Okavango catchment is dominated by aeolian sands and outcrops of weathered bedrock (Fig. 1). The annual sediment discharge within the Cubango-Okavango River consists mainly of bed and solute loads (bed: 170,000 tonnes; solute: 360,000 tonnes) while suspended sediment forms only a minor component (8 mg/l or 39,000 tonnes) 18,19. As a consequence of the high sediment porosity (very well-sorted with rounded grains) over 80 to 90% 20 of seasonal flood water infiltrates into the Delta from the Cubango-Okavango River with peak flows in the Panhandle in April and early May (Fig. 1). Much of this shallow water is then transpired by Delta vegetation as this slow moving flood wave takes over four months to reach the south eastern extremity of the Delta (i.e., in