Hayley S Clements

Stellenbosch University | SUN · Centre for Sustainability Transitions

Africa is vulnerable to a diverse range of climate change hazards that have significant impacts on food security, biodiversity loss, water crises and prevalence of infectious diseases. With much of the continent’s population reliant on ecosystems to sustain their livelihoods, degradation of ecosystems caused by both climatic and non-climatic stress...

Sustainability-focused research networks and communities of practice have emerged as a key response and strategy to build capacity and knowledge to support transformation towards more sustainable, just and equitable futures. This paper synthesises insights from the development of a community of practice on social-ecological systems (SES) research i...

A new path for rhinoceros (rhino) conservation is needed. Recent data signal the alarming impact of poaching on populations in Africa's rhino stronghold, the state‐run Kruger National Park (South Africa), which today supports one quarter the rhinos than a decade ago. We aggregated African rhino population data, highlighting the growing role of priv...

The extensive human impact on Earth is characterized by deeply intertwined social and ecological changes. Biodiversity is a foundational part of social-ecological systems, with humans interacting with biodiversity in constantly evolving ways. We describe the key characteristics of social-ecological systems, using protected areas as an example. We h...

As conservation biology has matured, its scope has expanded from a primarily ecological focus to recognition that nearly all conservation problems involve people. At the same time, conservation actions have been increasingly informed by ever more sophisticated quantitative models. These models have focused primarily on ecological and geographic ele...

The COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to assess the impacts of a global disturbance on conservation land uses and learn from responses to the crisis to enable more resilient conservation systems. To understand socio-economic responses of diverse wildlife working lands to COVID-19, we surveyed owners and managers of 78 private wildlife ranch...

Social-ecological systems (SES) research has emerged as an important area of sustainability science, informing and supporting pressing issues of transformation towards more sustainable, just and equitable futures. To date, much SES research has been done in or from the Global North, where the challenges and contexts for supporting sustainability tr...

In this paper, four relational heuristic responses for exploring new modes of engagement, or patterns of activity, that could enliven humanity's efforts in fostering systemic thinking and action to inform sustainability transitions are offered. Their purpose is to realise more resilient and just Anthropocene futures. These relational heuristics are...

Chapter 6 deals with the set of methods related to ecological field data-collection methods, which can be used to understand how human activities influence ecological elements and processes, and how ecological patterns and processes influence social outcomes. The chapter discusses point counts and survey grids, transects, distance and plotless samp...

The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods for Social-Ecological Systems provides a synthetic guide to the range of methods that can be employed in social-ecological systems (SES) research. The book is primarily targeted at graduate students, lecturers and researchers working on SES, and has been written in a style that is accessible to readers en...

There is increasing interest in the potential of private land conservation areas (PLCAs) as a complementary biodiversity conservation strategy to state-owned protected areas. However, there is limited understanding of how the diverse social-ecological contexts of PLCAs influence their effectiveness in conserving biodiversity. Here, we investigated...

The widespread activity of recreational hunting is proposed as a means of conserving nature and supporting livelihoods. However, recreational hunting-especially trophy hunting-has come under increasing scrutiny based on ethical concerns and the arguments that it can threaten species and fail to contribute meaningfully to local livelihoods. We provi...

Conserving biodiversity in the long term will depend in part on the capacity of Protected Areas (PAs) to cope with cross-scale, social-ecological disturbances and changes, which are becoming more frequent in a highly connected world. Direct threats to biodiversity within PAs and their interactions with broader-scale threats are both likely to vary...

Original article: https://doi.org/10.17159/sajs.2020/7598 The ORCID identifier [https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7311-3223] given for one of the authors, Stefanie Freitag (South African National Parks, South Africa), is incorrect. This ORCID identifier is assigned to a different individual also named Stefanie Freitag. The person to whom this ORCID ID co...

Private landowners in South Africa conserve roughly 40% of white rhinos globally. Given concerns that escalating poaching has caused private-rhino owners to disinvest, we used a national survey to assess 171 private-rhino owners’ responses to the crisis. Twenty-eight percent of rhino owners are disinvesting in rhino, 57% are pursuing business-as-us...

Private land conservation areas (PLCAs) are increasingly looked to for meeting the deficit left by state-owned protected areas in reaching global conservation targets. However, despite the increasing extent and recognition of PLCAs as a complementary conservation strategy, little research has been done to quantify their effectiveness; a critical co...

Institutions are vital to the sustainability of social-ecological systems, balancing individual and group interests and coordinating responses to change. Ecological decline and social conflict in many places, however, indicate that our understanding and fostering of effective institutions for natural resource management is still lacking. We assess...

Private land conservation areas (PLCAs) have become critical for achieving global conservation goals, but we lack understanding of how and when these areas respond to global pressures and opportunities. In southern Africa, where many PLCAs rely on trophy hunting as an income‐generating strategy, a potential ban on trophy hunting locally or abroad h...

Views that protected area (PA) expansion relies predominantly on land purchased by government are increasingly being challenged. The inclusion of privately owned PAs (PPAs) in national conservation strategies is now commonplace, but little is known about their long‐term persistence and how it compares to that of state‐owned PAs. We undertook the fi...

Biodiversity conservation relies heavily on protected areas ( PA s). However, in locations that are desirable for agriculture, industry, or human habitation (e.g., lowland habitats on fertile soils, coastal zones), land is often privately owned and state‐owned PA s tend to be under‐represented. Despite the potentially disproportionate contribution...

There is a growing recognition of the contribution that privately-owned land makes to conservation efforts, and governments are increasingly counting privately protected areas (PPAs) towards their international conservation commitments. The public availability of spatial data on countries' conservation estates is important for broad-scale conservat...

Aim Species require sufficiently large and connected areas of suitable habitat to support populations that can persist through change. With extensive alteration of unprotected natural habitat, there is increasing risk that protected areas (PAs) will be too small and isolated to support viable populations in the long term. Consequently, this study a...

Worldwide, decline in ungulate species abundance has a direct detrimental impact on cooccurring predator species. The objective of this chapter was to assess the conservation status of ungulates in North and West Africa, and the likely consequence for the endangered northwest African cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus hecki). Many of the cheetah's prey spec...

The ability of private conservation organizations to remain financially viable is a key factor influencing their effectiveness. A third of financially-motivated private land conservation areas (PLCAs) surveyed previously in South Africa were found to be unprofitable, raising questions about their ability to effectively adapt their business models t...

There has been limited consideration of the dynamic interactions between ecosystem service supply and demand. For self-funded private protected areas (PPAs), managers’ abilities to provide cultural ecosystem services (CESs) for which tourists are willing to pay may be critical to their sustainability. We predicted that a PPA’s management strategy w...

In managed natural resource systems, such as fisheries and rangelands, there is a recognized trade-off between managing for short-term benefits and managing for longer-term resilience. Management actions that stabilize ecological attributes or processes can improve productivity in the supply of ecosystems goods and services short-term, but erode sy...

The proliferation of private land conservation areas (PLCAs) is placing increasing pressure on conservation authorities to effectively regulate their ecological management. Many PLCAs depend on tourism for income, and charismatic large mammal species are considered important for attracting international visitors. Broad-scale socioeconomic factors t...

ABSTRACT. It is extremely important for biodiversity conservation that protected areas are resilient to a range of potential future perturbations. One of the least studied influences on protected area resilience is that of disease. We argue that wildlife disease (1) is a social-ecological problem that must be approached from an interdisciplinary pe...

Predator prey preferences shape the dynamics of predator–prey assemblages. Understanding the determinants of a predator's prey preferences is therefore important. Trends in prey preferences of the large African predators have been described at a species scale, limiting our ability to assess the influence of prey morphology (size and horns) and pred...

Broad-scale models describing predator prey preferences serve as useful departure points for understanding predator-prey interactions at finer scales. Previous analyses used a subjective approach to identify prey weight preferences of the five large African carnivores, hence their accuracy is questionable. This study uses a segmented model of prey...

The recent surge in the development of protected areas (PAs) in southern Africa has resulted in the reintroduction of carnivores that had largely been extirpated from the region (including African wild dog Lycaon pictus, cheetah Acinonyx jubatus, leopard Panthera pardus, lion Panthera leo and spotted hyaena Crocuta crocuta). Reintroductions offer a...

The endangered snow leopard is a large felid that is distributed over 1.83 million km(2) globally. Throughout its range it relies on a limited number of prey species in some of the most inhospitable landscapes on the planet where high rates of human persecution exist for both predator and prey. We reviewed 14 published and 11 unpublished studies pe...

There is a need for better information regarding managing large carnivores in small (<30 000 ha) conservation areas in southern Africa. The recent surge in the development of small, fenced and intensively managed conservation areas has meant an increase in reintroduced carnivores that had previously been extirpated from the region. Protected fro...