About
412
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Introduction
Rob Slotow currently works at the School of Life Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal. Rob does research Conservation Biology and Environmental Management. He is leading a number of transdisciplinary projects, including being one of the PIs on a Wellcome funded project: Sustainable and Healthy Food Systems, which links agriculture, environment, poverty and health.
Additional affiliations
January 1989 - August 1989
July 1995 - December 1995
October 1993 - June 1995
Education
September 1989 - September 1993
Publications
Publications (412)
Food from trees and green spaces can diversify diets and enhance food and nutrition security for households. However, sourcing food from these areas often receives little attention in addressing nutrition issues. This study assessed the contribution of trees and green spaces to household food consumption and nutrition in the eThekwini Municipal Are...
Wildlife tagging provides critical insights into animal movement ecology, physiology, and behavior amid global ecosystem changes. However, the stress induced by capture, handling, and tagging can impact post-release locomotion and activity and, consequently, the interpretation of study results. Here, we analyze post-tagging effects on 1585 individu...
We investigated the trajectory of depressive symptoms (“depression”) from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa (March 2020) until 2021, between individuals with and without pre-pandemic depression, specifically regarding the role of food security. Our investigation used publicly available panel data (N = 6,930) from the South African...
Dietary diversity is one of the fundamental factors of nutritional security and a proxy used to measure diet quality. The objective of this study was to investigate the relationship between village chicken availability and the dietary diversity of households along a rural–urban gradient. Face-to-face interviews were conducted using a structured que...
The preservation and augmentation of soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks is critical to designing climate change mitigation strategies and alleviating global warming. However, due to the susceptibility of SOC stocks to environmental and topo-climatic variability and changes, it is essential to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the state of curre...
Introduction
Access to credit and information and communication technology (ICT) plays a pivotal role in enhancing the practices of small-scale sugarcane farmers, impacting their financial, social, and economic wellbeing. However, many small-scale farmers need help accessing these resources, thereby affecting their ability to generate sustainable i...
Soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks are critical for land management strategies and climate change mitigation. However, understanding SOC distribution in South Africa’s arid and semi-arid regions remains a challenge due to data limitations, and the complex spatial and sub-surface variability in SOC stocks driven by desertification and land degradation...
Conserving and restoring biodiversity is central to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. The need to curb biodiversity loss through the mainstreaming of biodiversity considerations within land-use planning is consistently highlighted in global biodiversity assessments intended for policymakers and practitioners. We present a Global...
The increasing demand for food, including inequities in household food and nutrition security, is exerting pressure on the agrifood system, which is already threatened by climate change, environmental degradation and declining agro-biodiversity. mainstreaming neglected and underutilised crop species could help communities overcome these challenges....
Due to the need to continuously monitor and understand the thermal environment and its socioeconomic implications, this study used remotely sensed data to analyze thermal comfort variation in LCZs, including along the rural to urban gradient of the eThekwini Municipality in KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa. LCZs were mapped using multi-tempor...
Developing countries in Africa face an unemployment crisis, with many unemployed youth. Agriculture has been identified as a strategic sector for employment creation targeted at youth, including those who may not have agriculture-related qualifications. However, various challenges limit the effectiveness of youth participation in the agriculture va...
The global challenges of biodiversity loss and persistent poverty and inequality, which interact and shape each other at the local scale, require new strategies to improve human well-being and conserve biodiversity. In South Africa, inclusive and transformative conservation approaches are gaining support, which is of particular importance given the...
Achieving sustainable and healthy food systems in support of human and planetary health is a global challenge. We systematically reviewed papers (n = 2322) showing how village chicken products (meat, eggs, and offal) contribute to sustainable and healthy food systems for children along a rural–urban gradient. A total of 72 articles, representing al...
The size of the home range of a mammal is affected by numerous factors. However, in the normally solitary, but polygynous, Leopard (Panthera pardus), home range size and maintenance is complicated by their transitory social grouping behavior, which is dependent on life history stage and/or reproductive status. In addition, the necessity to avoid co...
South Africa faces the triple burden of malnutrition, high poverty levels, unemployment, and inequality. “Wicked problems” such as these require innovative and transdisciplinary responses, multi-stakeholder coordination and collaboration, managing complex synergies and trade-offs, and achieving sustainable outcomes. Through qualitative content anal...
This series of five policy briefs draws on research conducted by South African and United Kingdom- based researchers within the SHEFS consortium. The series seeks to encourage policy makers working on the commercial broiler chicken system in South Africa to adopt a broad systems-based perspective in their work.
This first brief provides an introdu...
This series of five policy briefs draws on research conducted by South African and United Kingdom- based researchers within the SHEFS consortium. The series seeks to encourage policy makers working on the commercial broiler chicken system in South Africa to adopt a broad systems-based perspective in their work.
This brief explores the implications...
This series of five policy briefs draws on research conducted by South African and United Kingdom- based researchers within the SHEFS consortium. The series seeks to encourage policy makers working on the commercial broiler chicken system in South Africa to adopt a broad systems-based perspective in their work.
This brief highlights the system’s i...
This series of five policy briefs draws on research conducted by South African and United Kingdom- based researchers within the SHEFS consortium. The series seeks to encourage policy makers working on the commercial broiler chicken system in South Africa to adopt a broad systems-based perspective in their work.
This brief highlights the risks from...
This series of five policy briefs draws on research conducted by South African and United Kingdom- based researchers within the SHEFS consortium. The series seeks to encourage policy makers working on the commercial broiler chicken system in South Africa to adopt a broad systems-based perspective in their work.
This brief highlights the systemic i...
Introduction
High crop productivity has the potential to improve the food and nutrition security status of not only smallholder farmers but also households in general. However, smallholder farmers operate in a dynamic environment whereby their crop production is affected by various factors that hinder it from lessening food insecurity and malnutrit...
The importance of smallholder farming is increasingly recognized in rural areas where increased crop productivity and market participation can effectively improve their dietary diversity and nutrition quality. However, rural households are still faced with severe food insecurity and malnutrition. The study sought to assess the role of smallholder f...
Clean water and sanitation provisions are essential for good hygiene and health, with rural South Africa facing a simultaneous access crisis of both, the direct health effect of restricted access to both on mental health remaining scarce and largely overlooked. This study investigated the association between access to clean water and sanitation on...
The sustainability of agroecosystems is at risk owing to continuous anthropogenic disturbance. As such, there is a need to evaluate indicator taxa that may be used to monitor the health of agricultural management systems. Carabid beetles are ubiquitous and functionally crucial in agroecosystems while at the same time are sensitive to the changes ca...
Resource partitioning promotes coexistence among guild members, and carnivores reduce interference competition through behavioral mechanisms that promote spatio-temporal separation. We analyzed sympatric lion and spotted hyena movements and activity patterns to ascertain the mechanisms facilitating their coexistence within semi-arid and wetland eco...
Introduction
Intercropping cereals with legumes can intensify rainfed cereal monocropping for improved household food and nutritional security. However, there is scant literature confirming the associated nutritional benefits.
Methodology
A systematic review and meta-analysis of nutritional water productivity (NWP) and nutrient contribution (NC) o...
Climate and topography are influential variables in the autumn senescence of grassland ecosystems. For instance, extreme weather can lead to earlier or later senescence than normal, while higher altitudes often favor early grass senescence. However, to date, there is no comprehensive understanding of key remote-sensing-derived environmental variabl...
For large herbivores living in highly dynamic environments, maintaining range fidelity has the potential to facilitate the exploitation of predictable resources while minimising energy expenditure. We evaluate this expectation by examining how the seasonal range fidelity of African elephants (Loxodonta africana) in the Kruger National Park, South A...
With elephant numbers increasing in some parts of their range, and related conservation concerns including elephants’ impact on vegetation and human–elephant conflict, management interventions have been used to artificially reduce elephant numbers, to stabilize populations locally and regionally, or to affect their spatial distribution. Interventio...
Biodiversity conservation strategies may prioritise certain values of nature over others. Whilst there will likely always be a need for compromise in conservation planning, the consequences of trade-offs depend on peoples' relative perceptions of values that are promoted or neglected. In practice, not fully understanding or taking into account the...
Background
There is an alarming trend in sub-Saharan Africa in the use of codeine-containing pharmaceuticals, but its risk of common comorbidities, such as mental health, remains unquantified at a national-level. We investigated the relationship between codeine use and onset of depression in South Africa at a population-level.
Methods
We used nati...
The scaling up of antiretroviral therapy services over the past decades has led to a remarkable reduction in HIV infections and HIV-related deaths in South Africa (SA). While this is a step in the right direction, it brings a new public health challenge into focus, namely psychological challenges associated with such chronic and often stigmatising...
Cities amplify the risks from climate change and advance opportunities to address them. Scientific research offers an evidence-based approach to understanding challenges, and possible responses available to local decision makers as they manage the interface between climate change and urban environments. In March 2018, academics, practitioners and p...
In the climate change arena, the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), while not policy prescriptive, are important for informing international negotiations and the decisions of policy and practice communities. Since 2015, when the Paris Agreement was adopted, there has been an increasing demand for climate action and...
Agricultural production in arid and semi-arid regions is particularly vulnerable to climate change, which, combined with projected food requirements, makes the sustainable management of water resources critical to ensure national and global food security. Using South Africa as an example, we map the spatial distribution of water use by seventeen ma...
Addressing the disproportionate burden of food insecurity in South Africa requires targeted efforts to help smallholder farmers to access markets. The purpose of this study was to assess determinants of market participation and its contribution to household food security. The secondary data used in this study were collected from 1520 respondents; h...
Global broiler production and consumption levels continue to rise. South Africa’s broiler system is dominated by commercial production and formal retail trade, with competition from cheap imports. Local broiler policies have narrow, production-driven, short-term aims for industry growth and national food security. However, these have unintended con...
Agricultural intensification with the continuous use of pesticides and intensive tillage contributes to the loss and extinction of invertebrates. Over 40% of insect species may become extinct in the next few decades. The extinction of a single insect species has the potential to have severe consequences for food production. As a result, epigeic pre...
Nature’s contributions to people diminish when people are alienated from nature. We developed a framework to help support more sustainable people-nature interactions in the context of the conservation of African elephants (Loxodonta africana and L. cyclotis). Elephants are iconic, and ecologically, culturally, and socio-economically important, but...
There are growing calls to adopt more sustainable forms of agriculture that balance the need to increase production with environmental, human health, and wellbeing concerns. Part of this conversation has included a debate on promoting and mainstreaming neglected and underutilized crop species (NUS) because they represent a more ecologically friendl...
Background
Interference competition among sympatric carnivores can potentially influence species viability through population reduction or extinction, and has important implications for the structure and function of large carnivore communities. Carnivores may mitigate the risk of competition through fine-scaled spatial or temporal separation that s...
Over the years, South Africa has made significant investments aimed at transforming the agricultural sector to deliver on rural economic development and job creation. These investments have had varying levels of success; still, what is worrying is the high youth unemployment rate which is amongst the highest globally. We conducted a scoping review...
Sub-Saharan Africa faces unprecedented disasters, with climate change expected to exacerbate the frequency and severity of unpredictable and stressful catastrophic events. Unlike developed nations, reconstruction in developing nations is hindered by resource constraints, with certain communities potentially experiencing multiple and enduring effect...
Medicinal plants contribute substantially to the well‐being of people in large parts of the world, providing traditional medicine and supporting livelihoods from trading plant parts, which is especially significant for women in low‐income communities. However, the availability of wild medicinal plants is increasingly threatened; for example, the Na...
The global goal to end hunger requires the interpretation of problems and change across multiple domains to create the scope for collaboration, learning, and impactful research. We facilitated a workshop aimed at understanding how stakeholders problematize sustainable diet transition (SDT) among a previously marginalized social group. Using the sys...
International experience reveals that food policy development often occurs in silos and offers few tangible mechanisms to address the interlinked, systemic issues underpinning food and nutrition insecurity. This paper investigated what South African government policies cover in terms of different aspects of the food system, who is responsible for t...
Resource partitioning promotes coexistence among guild members, and carnivores reduce interference competition through behavioural mechanisms that promote spatio-temporal separation. We analyzed sympatric lion and spotted hyena movements and activity patterns to ascertain the mechanisms facilitating their coexistence within semi-arid and wetland ec...
The transmission of reliable information between individuals is crucial for group-living animals. This is particularly the case for cognitively advanced mammals with overlapping generations that acquire detailed social and ecological knowledge over long lifetimes. Here, we directly compare the ecological knowledge of elephants from two populations,...
Using an environmental impact assessment (EIA) methodology, we provide a novel approach to identify and assess social-ecological outcomes from civic ecology interventions. We quantified the impact significance of six civic (community led) interventions implemented by the Wise Wayz Water Care (WWWC) local community programme (solid waste management,...
African experts remain underrepresented in global climate change work and assessments, potentially from patterns of international funding, collaborations, or funder mandates. We evaluated authorship and funding of African climate science by searching Web of Science Core Collection for studies published between database inception and 31 October 2018...
Cities amplify the risks from climate change and advance opportunities to address them. Scientific research offers an evidence-based approach to understanding challenges, and possible responses available to local decision makers as they manage the interface between climate change and urban environments. In March 2018, academics, practitioners and p...
Background: The KwaZulu-Natal Sandstone Sourveld (KZNSS) Research Programme is part of a collaborative, transdisciplinary research partnership between the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the eThekwini Municipality (EM), aimed at bridging the science-policy-practice gap. The research programme focuses on generating knowledge and capacity to support...
Accurate information on irrigated areas' spatial distribution and extent are crucial in enhancing agricultural water productivity, water resources management, and formulating strategic policies that enhance water and food security and ecologically sustainable development. However, data are typically limited for smallholder irrigated areas, which is...
Edible insects are an important natural commodity in rural areas that is used for household consumption and to generate income through trade. As a result, edible-insect trading is a profitable business that provides employment and improves the livelihoods of impoverished rural people. This study aimed at determining the socioeconomic benefits of an...
This paper highlights the potential for learning and virtual collaboration in international research teams to contribute towards sustainability goals. Previous research confirmed the environmental benefits of carbon savings from international virtual conferences. This paper adds the social and economic dimensions by using a combination of qualitati...
Fire and elephant herbivory are major drivers of large tree mortality in savanna ecosystems. Although the spatial variation of these agents is well studied, less attention has been paid to how disturbance history influences tree mortality over time. In a long‐term cohort study, we examined how the sequence of fire‐ and elephant‐induced damage influ...
Objective
The WHO has declared food safety as a public health concern. Transport hubs such as taxi ranks, bus stations and other transport exchange sites are major food trading/purchasing sites, particularly in Africa. Research evidence is needed to improve food safety policies and ensure consumption of safe food, owing to the increasing burden of...
Fires are common in many ecosystems world‐wide, and are frequently used as a management tool. Although the responses of herbivores to fire have been well‐studied, the responses of carnivores to fire remain unclear. In particular, post‐fire habitat changes, and the associated changes in prey availability, might affect the coexistence or competition...