Ben J Strohbach

The Namibia University of Science and Technology · Biodiversity Research Centre

Global patterns of regional (gamma) plant diversity are relatively well known, but whether these patterns hold for local communities, and the dependence on spatial grain, remain controversial. Using data on 170,272 georeferenced local plant assemblages, we created global maps of alpha diversity (local species richness) for vascular plants at three...

Termite mounds contribute to the heterogeneity and productivity of many semi‐arid ecosystems worldwide. Regular spatial patterns of termite mounds are well documented but the underlying pattern‐building mechanisms remain to be clarified. This study analysed a comprehensive data set of Macrotermes michaelseni mound metrics, spatial patterns and dyna...

Changing climatic conditions and unsustainable land use are major threats to savannas worldwide. Historically, many African savannas were used intensively for livestock grazing, which contributed to widespread patterns of bush encroachment across savanna systems. To reverse bush encroachment, it has been proposed to change the cattle-dominated land...

covers broad environmental areas of ecology, agriculture, forestry, agro-forestry, social science, economics, water and energy, climate change, planning, land use, pollution, strategic and environmental assessments and related fields. The journal addresses the sustainable development agenda of the country in its broadest context. It publishes four...

Changing climatic conditions and unsustainable land use are perceived as major threats to savannas worldwide. In the past, land use in African savannas was dominated by livestock-farming as one of the major economic products, which led to degraded, shrub encroached pastures in many regions. One response to this widespread degradation is a shift fro...

Background: The Great Escarpment of southern Africa takes the form of an extended mountainous highland in central-western Namibia, commonly referred to as the ‘Khomas Hochland’. It is regarded as an area of high botanical diversity. Yet only few localised studies on the vegetation composition are available. The Khomas Hochland is formed on the sout...

The Farm Klein Boesman, south of Dordabis in the Khomas Region of Central Namibia, is situated on the ecotone between the Central Highlands/Central Plateau and the southern Kalahari. Whereas a considerable amount of information is available for the Kalahari Duneveld in South Africa, little is known of the same ecosystem in Namibia, specifically the...

The Vegetation Survey of Namibia project has been initiated to provide baseline data in support of sustainable land-use planning. The finding of historical data from the Farm Erichsfelde initiated a long-term monitoring programme. This study serves as a baseline description of the vegetation associations. Regular Braun-Blanquet type sampling was do...

Mine rehabilitation is compulsory under the Namibian Environmental Management Act. B2Gold’s Otjikoto gold mine complies by committing to rehabilitation of their waste-rock dumps and other disturbance features within their mining licence area in the Otjozondjupa Region. As the mine is in the early stages of operation and has committed to run-of-mine...

The SASSCAL region is home to a very rich biodiversity, which provides signifi cant economic and intrinsic value to human society. Th is biodiversity, however, is subject to multiple stresses emerging from human land use and climate change, which leads to biodiversity loss at substantial scale. To assess the current state and changes in biodiversit...

The SASSCAL region is home to a very rich biodiversity, which provides significant economic and intrinsic value to human society. This biodiversity, however, is subject to multiple stresses emerging from human land use and climate change, which leads to biodiversity loss at substantial scale. To assess the current state and changes in biodiversity...

Automatic weather stations (AWSs) serve a number of goals in the SASSCAL context and beyond. A sufficient cover and density in geographical space is needed to record spatial climatic variability and to feed climate models and forecast services. In addition, research projects using an ecosystem approach require robust information on local weather. I...

Aims: The usefulness of phytosociological descriptions is often not recognised by land use planners and -managers, as these do not provide much information useful for their purpose. With this paper a "Suitability Index" is introduced to illustrate the suitability of natural vegetation types for extensive livestock farming (being one of the main lan...

Mapping tree species at the single-tree level is an active field of research linking ecology and remote sensing. However, the discrimination of tree species requires the selection of the relevant spectral features derived from imagery. We can extract an extensive number of image parameters even from images with a low spectral resolution, such as Re...

Considering projected climate and socio-economic development for Southern Africa, a major challenge in southern Africa is to find mechanisms to adapt to climate change and to secure water at sufficient quality and quantity for both, human well-being and the stability of ecosystem functions and services. Many countries of southern Africa face inadeq...

The Auas-Oanob Conservancy is situated in the very rugged, botanically highly diverse Khomas Hochland in central Namibia. A number of vegetation-related studies have been undertaken in this highland before, but none covering the full extent of the conservancy, and with different interpretations of the syntaxonomy of the vegetation. The current stud...

TFO researchers presented their respective results concerning the targets to raise the awareness of people of the values of biodiversity (A1), to reduce the rate of loss of all natural habitats (B5), to enhance the area under conservation (C11), to enhance the contribution of biodiversity to carbon storage (D15) and to enhance the level of particip...

In many parts of Africa, spatially-explicit information on plant α-diversity, i.e., the number of species in a given area, is missing as baseline information for spatial planning. We present an approach on how to combine vegetation-plot databases and remotely-sensed land surface phenology (LSP) metrics to predict plant α-diversity on a regional sca...

The trade with indigenous plant products has increased over the past years, contributing considerable to the household economies of rural people. Likewise, the trade with thatch grasses in north eastern Namibia has grown to a multi-million dollar industry, with a considerable amount being exported to neighbouring Angola. However, confusion still ex...

Prosopis infestation along the Fish River in southern Namibia poses a considerable threat to the environment; in particular, it reduces the water flow/water yield in the river. In this paper we propose that the trees be removed and utilised as firewood, which would also generate an income to the local community. For this, an average wood biomass pe...

Poster presented at the GfÖ in Göttingen 2015

The establishment of communal conservancies aims to have the local communities share in the benefits especially of wildlife resources, in this way spearheading the conservation of the environment. The Desert Margins Programme in Namibia aimed to develop vegetation resource data for the Otjituuo, Okamatapati, Ozonahi, African Wild Dog, Otjinene, Epu...

The establishment of communal conservancies aims to have the local communities share in the benefits especially of wildlife resources, in this way spearheading the conservation of the environment. The Desert Margins Programme in Namibia aimed to develop vegetation resource data for the Otjituuo, Okamatapati, Ozonahi, African Wild Dog, Otjinene, Epu...

The eastern communal conservancies are situated along the western fringe of the Kalahari basin. Under a very short rainfall gradient, the vegetation abruptly changes from microphyllous Acacia-dominated savannas to mesophyll savannas, dominated by Terminalia sericea and Combretum spp. We hypothesise that this is caused by changes in soil moisture av...

The establishment of communal conservancies aims to have the local communities share in the benefits especially of wildlife resources, in this way spearheading the conservation of the environment. The Desert Margins Programme in Namibia aimed to develop vegetation resource data for the Otjituuo, Okamatapati, Ozonahi, African Wild Dog, Otjinene, Epu...

The international, interdisciplinary biodiversity research project BIOTA AFRICA initiated a standardized biodiversity monitoring network along climatic gradients across the African continent. Due to an identified lack of adequate monitoring designs, BIOTA AFRICA developed and implemented the standardized BIOTA Biodiversity Observatories, that meet...

Limited historic vegetation data (prior to the 1980s) are available for Namibia. Finding such historic data at Haribes prompted a follow-up survey of the vegetation. We present a classification of the recent data in this paper as a first step towards comparing the two data sets. Six new associations (three with two subassociations each) are formall...

Limited historic vegetation data (prior to the 1980s) are available for Namibia. Finding such historic data at Haribes prompted a follow-up survey of the vegetation. We present a classification of the recent data in this paper as a first step towards comparing the two data sets. Six new associations (three with two subassociations each) are formall...

Limited historic vegetation data (prior to the 1980s) are available for Namibia. Finding such historic data at Haribes prompted a follow-up survey of the vegetation. We present a classification of the recent data in this paper as a first step towards comparing the two data sets. Six new associations (three with two subassociations each) are formall...

Vegetation maps are essential to land use planning, by providing information regarding an important resource for especially extensive livestock farming, but also game farming, and with that, the tourism industry. However, many vegetation maps provide only a name of the vegetation unit, in combination with a spatial description – mostly in the form...

Integrated ecosystem assessment initiatives are important steps towards a global biodiversity observing system. Reliable earth observation data are key information for tracking biodiversity change on various scales. Regarding the establishment of standardized environmental observation systems, a key question is: What can be observed on each scale a...

Land-cover is an important parameter in analyzing the state and dynamics of natural and anthropogenic terrestrial ecosystems. Land-cover classes related to semi-arid savannas currently exhibit among the greatest uncertainties in available global land cover datasets. This study focuses on the Kalahari in northeastern Namibia and compares the effects...

Patterns of vascular plant diversity were studied at different spatial scales (100 m², 1000 m², 1 ha and 1 km²) along the BIOTA Southern Africa transects from the Kavango in northern Namibia to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, covering six biomes in the western part of southern Africa and a steep rainfall gradient. We analysed family richness...

The characterization and evaluation of the recent status of biodiversity in Southern Africa’s Savannas is a major prerequisite for suitable and sustainable land management and conservation purposes. This paper presents an integrated concept for vegetation type mapping in a dry savanna ecosystem based on local scale in-situ botanical survey data wit...

The characterization and evaluation of the recent status of biodiversity in Southern Africa’s Savannas is a major prerequisite for suitable and sustainable land management and conservation purposes. This paper presents an integrated concept for vegetation type mapping in a dry savanna ecosystem based on local scale in-situ botanical survey data wit...

Studies in landscape ecology which include hydrological

No detailed vegetation descriptions are available for the Kavango woodlands — recent descriptions have all been at the broad landscape level without describing any vegetation communities. With this paper the vegetation associations found at and around the Mile 46 Livestock Development Centre (LDC) are described. Two broad classes are recognised: th...

Mapping vegetation structure units is a critical task for biodiversity inventories, modeling, and conversation studies. In a larger framework, global change studies including climate modeling or land surface change detection demand detailed vegetation maps for improved results. This study uses an existing vegetation map of Namibia with 23 vegetatio...

Plant communities form the basic units in all ecological processes, and are thus also to be regarded as basic units of natural resources management (like pasture management). Unfortunately, no concise description of the vegetation is available. The preliminary vegetation map (Giess 1971), although being reprinted for the 3 rd time during 1998, is p...

Published and unpublished reports and a questionnaire were used to compile an overview of completed, ongoing and planned vegetation survey related projects in Namibia. The main objective of this activity was to determine gaps and identify priorities for future research accordingly.

A proposed rural water supply scheme in the northern Oshikoto Region will impact on the settlement patterns of the rural population. For this reason an environmental impact assessment was commissioned. In this paper the degradation gradients found in the oshana system in the western part of the study area are discussed. Degradation is not only due...

A proposed rural water supply in the northern Oshikoto Region will impact on the settlement patterns of the rural population. For this reason an environmental impact assessment was commissioned. In this paper the degradation gradients found in the broad-leafed savannas in the eastern part of the study area are discussed. Degradation is mainly due t...

A proposed rural water supply in the northern Oshikoto Region will impact on the settlement patterns of the rural population. For this reason an environmental impact assessment was commissioned. In this paper the degradation gradients found in the Terminalia prunioides woodlands, being a transition between the Broad-leafed savannas to the north and...

A proposed rural water supply scheme in the northern Oshikoto Region will impact on the settlement patterns of the rural population. For this reason, an environmental impact assessment was commissioned. In this paper the degradation gradients found in the shrublands on the eastern fringe of the oshana system, dominated by Colophospermum mopane, are...

Five encroaching species (Acacia mellifera, A. nilotica, Dichrostachys cinerea, Terminalia prunioides and T. seilcea) have been fire-girdled at various heights and during various seasons. The height of coppice has been measured at two assessments after f ire-girdling and the number of dead plants noted. The regrowth was the lowest and mortality rat...

Verhandeling (MSc)--PU vir CHO, 1989. Bibliografie: blaaie 100-113.