THE INAUGURAL GLOBAL CONGRESS FOR LINEAR INFRASTRUCTURE AND ENVIRONMENT
Wendy Collinson-Jonker, Endangered Wildlife Trust, wendyc@ewt.org.za The Endangered Wildlife Trust and the International Conference on Ecology and Transportation, otherwise known as ICOET, hosted the virtual Global Congress for Linear Infrastructure and Environment, on 20 and 21 September. With over 100 delegates from 24 different countries, the congress, aimed to provide a new opportunity for a global gathering that includes both the intellectual content of a scientific conference and the international reach of the United Nations and Sustainable Development Goals.
Linear infrastructure is essential for connecting society: our systems of roads, railways, pipelines, and power lines all serve to link our cities, developments and resources, and our energy and water supplies. Therefore, it is perhaps ironic that linear infrastructure does exactly the opposite for natural systems – by crisscrossing landscapes, linear infrastructure serves to fragment ecosystems, isolate populations, and reduce natural flows. Roads, railways, fences, and power lines constrain animal movements. They pose direct threats to species from collisions and indirect threats by increasing access by people to previously untapped resources.
Currently, there are five active continental conferences. The Infrastructure and Ecology Network Europe, or IENE, was established in 1996, whilst the International Conference on Ecology and Transportation, or ICOET, started in 1999, with a primary focus on the United States and North America. Both conferences presented the development of a new field of ecology. In 2009, the Australasian Network for Ecology and Transportation (ANET) commenced, followed by the Congresso Iberoamericano de Biodiversidade e Infraestrutura Viária or CIBIV in 2010 and then the newest, the African Conference for Linear Infrastructure and Ecology in 2019.
Each of these conferences has representatives from industry (e.g., planning, engineering, construction), representatives from transport, regulatory, planning, and environmental agencies at all levels of government, research institutions, non-government organisations, environmental consultants, and community groups (e.g., wildlife carers, environmental groups). While these conferences promote international participation, they are inherently focused on the work and issues important to their host continent, but they have joined forces for the Global Congress for Linear Infrastructure and Environment. GCLIE is intended to complement the existing continental conferences on transportation ecology by providing a platform that focuses on broader, higher-level, global issues and policies that can influence national and international knowledge sharing and bring about positive change. The Global Congress will facilitate truly global opportunities for conversation and debate issues that create bridges between and push the boundaries outside of our respective continental conferences, aiming to improve our understanding of world issues and influence action at this scale.
Building on the achievements of the continental conferences, the event also aims to develop tools (e.g., scientific briefs on particular topics) for influencing global decision-makers to aim for more sustainable new and existing linear infrastructure. The event is organised back-to-back with ICOET held virtually from 22-30 September 2021.
After nearly a year and a half of the global pandemic, we’re all extremely familiar with online engagement, and the online format has certainly enabled the participation of people from afar and will allow for constructive interaction among participants. By bringing together a diverse range of participants from across the world, GCLIE is fostering a community of practice that will collectively answer some of the most challenging questions of our time.
“I attended the GCLIE as a precursor to the 2021 ICOET conference. This congress was a truly comprehensive global overview of the factors fragmenting habitat, disturbing ecological functions, and impeding the necessary and natural movement of wildlife at multiple scales. Throughout the congress the conceptual framework of thinking globally and acting locally manifest in the case studies and policy level presentations and discussions. The GCLIE was an opportunity to identify commonalities, both great and small, that transcend geopolitical boundaries and align practitioners, academics, and policy-makers for success. The virtual format facilitated global participation and representation. Very well done. I look forward to the next GCLIE.”
– Chris Slesar | Environmental Resource Coordinator, Vermont Agency of Transportation, USA
“GCLIE was the first opportunity to discuss research and policy related to mitigating the impacts of linear infrastructure at a global level – involving a high diversity of researchers and practitioners with experience from all around the world. It felt reassuring to notice that different continents face similar challenges and to discuss together how we can all collaborate to overcome them.”
Dr. Fernanda Z. Teixeira, Postdoctoral researcher, Ecology Graduate Program, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)
“I had the pleasure this week to participate in the coming together of a global forum on transportation and the environment. The world is being transformed at an unprecedented speed through the construction of roads, railways, pipelines and other transportation infrastructure, and GCLIE must play a pivotal role in ensuring the infrastructure that is planned and built today has a positive impact on society and the natural environment. The need for GCLIE has never been more critical – and I am excited to see how GCLIE develops in the years ahead.”
Dr Rodney van der Ree, National Technical Executive – Ecology, WSP Australia Pty Limited
GCLIE 2021 not only provided a necessary bridge between existing continental communities of practice but begun the critical work of leveraging national and continental solutions to generate a global movement for ecologically sustainable linear infrastructure. Sarah Chiles, Landscape Infrastructure Advisor – Kenya, Ewaso Lions & Grevy’s Zebra Trust
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Science Snippets: Vultures’ Power – Traditional Use and Conservation Concerns
New Research on Vulture Use in Traditional Medicine
A published paper co-authored by EWT scientists* examines the complex relationship between traditional healing practices and vulture conservation in South Africa. This Science Snippets: Vultures’ Power study, titled Uses of Vultures in Traditional Medicines in the Kruger to Canyons Biosphere Region, South Africa, reveals critical insights into how cultural beliefs impact endangered vulture populations.
Key Findings from the Research
The study documents:
- Interviews with 51 traditional healers in Mpumalanga and Limpopo provinces
- Specific vulture parts used for different purposes:
- Brains: Believed to enhance clairvoyance
- Hearts: Thought to increase intelligence
- Livers: Used to promote prophetic dreams
- Mixed preparations: For employment-related purposes
Conservation Impacts
The research highlights alarming trends:
- Supply chain issues:
- Most vultures obtained through poisoning or trapping
- Single poisoning events often kill multiple birds
- Prices range from ZAR300 to ZAR1,500 per bird
- Population threats:
- Estimated 400-800 vultures used annually in the study region
- Cape vultures most sought-after for perceived potency
- Some healers report using up to 10 birds per year
Recommendations for Sustainable Coexistence
The authors propose balanced solutions:
- Developing alternatives: Promoting non-vulture ingredients for traditional medicine
- Community engagement: Educating about vultures’ ecological importance
- Policy reinforcement: Strengthening enforcement against illegal wildlife trade
- Monitoring programmes: Tracking vulture populations and trade patterns
The Way Forward
This Science Snippets: Vultures’ Power research provides crucial data to inform conservation strategies. While respecting cultural traditions, the study emphasises the urgent need to protect vulture populations that:
- Maintain ecosystem health through carcass removal
- Provide disease control by preventing pathogen spread
- Offer economic benefits to livestock farmers
Read the full study:
Journal of Raptor Research
Citation:
Mashele, N., Thompson, L.J., & Downs, C.T. (2021). Uses of Vultures in Traditional Medicines in the Kruger to Canyons Biosphere Region, South Africa. Journal of Raptor Research 55(3).
CONSERVATION CHAMPION
vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1633342873766{padding-top: 5px !important;padding-right: 5px !important;padding-bottom: 5px !important;padding-left: 5px !important;background-color: #ffffff !important;}”]A very big thank you to Nika Viljoen, who raised R5,600 for the EWT at her school, Potchefstroom Gymnasium, by encouraging learners to wear flip-flops for the day in exchange for a donation. This is what she had to say:
“I have always been someone who cares and who wants to make some kind of difference and this side of me started to really itch when I was 12/13. I would always try and come up with some kind of idea to do something, to help someone or make an impact, and that’s when the thought occurred to me to do a fundraiser. I came across the EWT, and everything they do immediately pulled me in. Nature and the incredible creatures God gifted us has always held a special place in my heart, and the fact that we are killing them, destroying their homes and taking away their families devastated me, and I knew I had to do something, anything to try and help, and raising funds for EWT was the perfect opportunity.”
I feel like we raised some good funds and I am eternally and incredibly grateful for the opportunity I got, but I am definitely not going to stop there. I will keep on trying to make a difference, step by step.”
“We need your help! The global covid crisis has shown us more than ever how important it is to work together to support the future of our planet – the people, the environment and the animals within it.
We will be running together and on our own over the next few months, and we will add our distances together to make up the 535 km journey from our school to Big Ben in London. We hope you will cheer us on by donating to this very worthy charity – www.ewt.org.za”
GUEST ARTICLE: MY JOURNEY IN ROAD ECOLOGY
A rewarding part of my career has been training and capacity-building and seeing people and organisations become local, regional, and world-leaders in their work. A highlight for me has been watching the growth of Wendy Collinson and the Endangered Wildlife Trust to become local and international leaders in transportation ecology.
My name is Dr Rodney van der Ree, and I first met Wendy Collinson in around 2010. Our first collaboration was to co-organise a symposium at the International Wildlife Management Congress in Durban in 2012, followed by a workshop at the EWT office in Johannesburg a couple of days later. The concept of ‘road ecology’ was explored for the first time in Africa at these two events, and participants clearly understood its importance. Wendy and the team at EWT continued to develop the program and established partnerships with local road agencies (namely Bakwena, N3TC and TRAC N4), SANParks and universities to begin collecting data and training students.
In 2015 I returned to South Africa to support another series of workshops on road ecology in Africa run by EWT at a conference in Howick (The Symposium of Contemporary Conservation Practice) and Johannesburg (The Green Mile). It was incredible to see the growth in the field since the initial visit in 2012 and participation by a larger and more diverse group of people. This was also an exciting trip for me because I brought about 30 copies of my recently published ‘Handbook of Road Ecology’ (www.handbookofroadecology.org), which included four chapters from Africa, including a Chapter by Wendy and colleagues at the EWT. The handbook has 62 chapters written by more than 100 leading transportation ecologists from around the world, and I have half-price copies available as part of the 2nd ACLIE congress (see ACLIE article) that was just held. If you are interested, please send me an email rvdr@unimelb.edu.au and I can give you a quote for postage.
I started my career as a post-doctoral researcher at The University of Melbourne Australia and very quickly became focused on quantifying and mitigating the impacts of roads and traffic on wildlife. With numerous students and collaborators (including Dr Manisha Bhardwaj, who wrote an article in this newsletter last month), this field of research and practice’s critical importance is growing rapidly. I have since moved into ecological consulting to work more closely with those who are planning, designing, building and managing the roads, railways and other linear infrastructure that is being built across Africa at a pace never seen before. In an effort to improve access to important information, I established the open-access resource hub www.TransportEcology.info earlier this year, with Wendy and Lucy Waruingi (from the African Conservation Centre) on the editorial board. The site includes blog-style summaries of relevant peer-reviewed scientific articles, as well as space for case studies and best-practise notes. You are invited to submit your articles for publication and encouraged to subscribe to receive notifications when new articles are published.
Transportation ecology in Africa has come a long way since Wendy, and I ran those initial meetings almost a decade ago. With Wendy spearheading the establishment of ACLIE and the successful online ACLIE congress in August 2021, there is now a much larger group of people involved and dozens of research and management projects across many parts of Africa. Importantly, there is a growing realisation in government of the need for applied research, comprehensive environmental impact assessments, and innovation to ensure the roads, railways, and other linear infrastructure we build today do not undermine our ecosystems’ ecological integrity and sustainability for decades to come.
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FIRE FOR FROGS: USING PLANNED BURNS TO SAVE THE HABITAT OF THE CRITICALLY ENDANGERED ROUGH MOSS FROG
Alouise Lynch, Bionerds, alouise.lynch@bionerds.co.za
Jeanne Tarrant, EWT Threatened Amphibian Programme Manager, jeannet@ewt.org.za
Kier Lynch, Bionerds, Keir.lynch@bionerds.co.za
The Klein Swartberg Mountain towers above the town of Caledon in the Western Cape of South Africa amidst a field of agricultural development. This lone mountain is home to the only known populations of the Critically Endangered (IUCN Red List 2016) Rough Moss Frog, a minuscule amphibian species that requires moist mountain seeps to breed. These habitats are severely at risk from encroaching alien pine infestations threatening to dry out these crucial habitats.
The Endangered Wildlife Trust’s (EWT) Threatened Amphibian Programme (TAP) included the Rough Moss Frog as a species of conservation priority given its endemicity, high level of threat, and known population decline (IUCN Red List 2016).
During initial surveys conducted by EWT in May 2020, we observed a marching forest of alien vegetation engulfing the then only known population of Rough Moss Frogs. It became evident that rapid intervention, in the form of an ecological burn, was needed to save and secure this population. Unfortunately, the Covid-19 epidemic halted all efforts to implement any interventions in 2020. The Rapid Action Grant from the IUCN Save Our Species and the European Union awarded to this project in May 2021 will be used to create a firebreak around the Rough Moss Frog populations in the coming months. Thereafter, in early 2022, a controlled ecological fire will be used to manage the aliens. The subsequent clearing of pines will create job opportunities for local alien vegetation clearing teams from the Caledon community.
In July 2021, we held stakeholder engagement meetings and conducted a site visit with the EWT, Enviro Wildfire, the Fynbos Trust, the Klein Swartberg Conservancy, Overberg Agri, and Bionerds to establish the placement of the firebreaks on the Klein Swartberg Mountain. We made an exciting discovery of a new population of Rough Moss Frogs during the site visit, further emphasising the importance of this rapid intervention!
This project is funded by the IUCN Save Our Species and the European Union. The IUCN Save our Species aims to improve the long-term survival prospects of threatened species. It also focuses on supporting the species’ habitats and working with the communities sharing this habitat. It achieves success by funding and coordinating conservation projects across the globe. The Member States of the European Union have decided to combine their know-how, resources, and destinies. Together, they have built a zone of stability, democracy, and sustainable development whilst maintaining cultural diversity, tolerance, and individual freedoms. The European Union is committed to sharing its achievements and values with countries and peoples beyond its borders.
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AFRICAN CONFERENCE FOR LINEAR INFRASTRUCTURE AND ECOLOGY
Wendy Collinson, EWT Wildlife and Transport Programme Manager, wendyc@ewt.org.za
Lourens Leeuwner, EWT Wildlife and Energy Programme Manager, lourensl@ewt.org.za
Sarah Chiles – Landscape Infrastructure Advisor – Kenya, Ewaso Lions and Grevy’s Zebra Trust, chiles.sarah@gmail.com
Harriet-Davies Mostert, EWT Head of Conservation, harrietd@ewt.org.za
The second African Conference for Linear Infrastructure and Ecology (ACLIE), co-hosted by the Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT), Grevy’s Zebra Trust (GZT), and Ewaso Lions (EL), took place between 12 and 17 August 2021. The first ACLIE conference was held in 2019 in the iconic Kruger National Park, South Africa, with 115 participants from 21 countries. ACLIE 2021 attracted almost 200 participants from 25 countries, 11 of which were African. We also had participants with diverse backgrounds from the engineering, ecology, policy, and finance sectors.
Linear infrastructure is essential for connecting society: our roads, railways, pipelines, and power lines link our cities, developments, resources, energy and water supplies. Therefore, it is perhaps ironic that linear infrastructure does exactly the opposite for natural systems – by crisscrossing landscapes, linear infrastructure serves to fragment ecosystems, isolate populations, and reduce natural flows. Roads, railways, fences, and power lines constrain animal movement, pose direct threats to species from collisions and indirect threats from increased human access to previously untapped resources, and new pathways for invasion by alien flora and fauna, with significant ecological consequences.
In many ways, Africa represents the final frontier for infrastructure development. The continent’s population has doubled in the last three decades and currently stands at 1.3 billion. Most experts agree that if it continues at its current rate, Africa’s population will double again by 2050. This means that about two-thirds of the world’s population growth is expected to take place on our continent, and by 2050 Africa will be home to more than a quarter of the world’s people. As populations and economies grow, they require greater investments in infrastructure. Over the next few decades, we will need significant investments in railways, roads, energy, and other infrastructure to meet the growing demands of emerging African economies.
ACLIE 2021 intends to foster and build on cross-sectoral African engagement and encourage the exchange of solutions around “Connecting for Resilience”. Considering the most pressing issues of our time – climate change, biodiversity loss, COVID-19, and the spectre of future pandemics – efforts to maintain ecological and human resilience are critical. The ability of ecosystems to maintain their functions and services is fundamental to sustainable development and human health.
This year’s conference was centred around four major sub-themes, one for each day. The first theme was centred around adapting to climate change, the second on innovating for mitigation and improvement, the third on planning for snowballing and cumulative impacts, and the fourth and final theme centred on applying economic tools and finance for reducing environmental impacts. After nearly a year and a half of the global pandemic, we’re all extremely familiar with online engagement, and this format has certainly enabled the participation of people from afar and allowed for constructive interaction among participants.
Each day, this conference kickstarted with an indaba, with a line-up of esteemed experts who shared their insights around the specific theme for the day. These were followed by the 20×20 sessions, where a series of presenters presented 20 images from a project they are involved in for 20 seconds. These included mitigation measures used in Cape Town to assist the Endangered Western Leopard Toad to cross the road, the use of a remotely piloted aircraft system (i.e. a drone) for marking power lines, and using bioacoustics methods to understand the linear movement of Endangered marine mammals. There were so many fantastic presentations about African issues that it is hard to select just a few to provide examples.
A new type of presentation for ACLIE was the Lion’s Den session, which provided a space where solutions were pitched to a panel of leaders, with opportunities for questions and input from the audience. Pitches included an intelligent green and grey infrastructure design system (iGGIDS), which obtained buy-in from the ‘Lions’, and the redesign of a roadkill reporting app.
Each of the first three days ended off with specialist training sessions delivered by leaders in their fields. This kind of training contributes strongly to the capacity building element of ACLIE and featured training on ‘Economic tools for informing linear infrastructure decision making’, energy system reliability through wildlife interaction mitigation’, and ‘design, construction and maintenance of wildlife crossing structures’.
Leonard Sielecki, Wildlife Program Manager from the British Columbia Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure, said, “I am very impressed by the large South African and African representation. You have attracted a very impressive, very comprehensive range of wildlife protection-related people from the African Continent.”
Further to this, Kishaylin Chetty, Senior Environmental Advisor for Eskom, said, “The ACLIE conference is an exceptional event, that coordinates industry, civil society, government, and specialists to come together to discuss theory and feasibility surrounding linear infrastructure and its practice through Africa. The conference is a founding pillar towards responsible development in Africa.”
“ACLIE has been an extremely important convergence of knowledge, expertise, and practice from the linear infrastructure and ecology and conservation worlds. We have seen everything from demonstrations of laying overpasses to the importance of road verges and powerline diverters. Critically, we have also received commitments from major financiers of how they intend, and are, streamlining their policies to ensure that, as Africa builds new infrastructure, our landscapes will remain connected, and we will remain the drivers of the process. There are few things more hopeful”. Resson Kantai Duff, Deputy Director of Ewaso Lions
“Despite the challenges of holding a conference remotely, ACLIE 2020 was superbly organised and moderated. Participants were lively and active, and I got to meet and learn from a lot of globally experienced ecologists and industry professionals. I especially enjoyed listening to cutting edge innovations in modelling and data collection as well as successful Private-Public Partnerships that have informed infrastructure development. Can’t wait for the next conference!” David Kimiti, Deputy Director Research and Impact, Grevy’s Zebra Trust
We want to extend our thanks to AfricaMassive for logistical support of the event, Dr Rodney van der Ree and Dr Fraser Shilling for the donation of the prizes, and all the speakers and attendees, without whom this conference would not have been possible.
Finally, we’d like to announce that the next ACLIE will be held in Kenya in 2023.
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