Under the rubric of the Human and Social Dynamics Grand Challenge, the Department of Science and Technology is piloting the Community-University Partnership Programme with four rural-based universities.
The National Research Foundation’s (NRF) mandate is to support and promote research. As part of this mandate, the NRF pro-actively facilitates the advancement of the frontiers of existing and new knowledge and expertise across the knowledge spectrum. Education research was identified as one of the priority areas given its importance in contributing to the improvement of the quality of life of all the people of the Republic.
Centres of Excellence (CoEs) are physical or virtual centres of research which concentrate existing capacity and resources to enable researchers to collaborate across disciplines on long-term projects that are locally relevant and internationally competitive in order to enhance the pursuit of research excellence and capacity development. CoEs have become a common research funding instrument, appearing in several countries like Australia, Canada, and the United States.
This project assembled, organised, analysed and archived two gigabytes of various long-term datasets (raw data, photographs, publications, etc.) as a contribution to SAEON’s Node for Arid Lands.
The project ensured the continuation of long-term monitoring by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) when funding was withdrawn by the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry. The importance of the project for monitoring climate change is demonstrated by the decline in Mean Annual Precipitation and Runoff.
The SAEON Egagasini Node has been designated by Marine and Coastal Management to manage the data for this international programme and SAEON researchers are participating in data collection on ASCLME cruises.
This project was conducted with volunteers and in collaboration with South African National Parks to determine baseline information necessary to establish if and how the mopaneveld will respond to climate change.
