Attending the Conservation Symposium – A learning experience
The conservation symposium hosted by the KZN Ezemvelo Wildlife and partners was held at Wild Coast Sun. It was an informative event comprising of 23 sessions addressing the theme of Biodiversity Economy. Attending the conference as a young aspiring scientist was an awesomely wonderful experience. Being in a room full of conservation practitioners, scientists and policy makers as a non-presenting attendee I got the chance to listen, engage and learn.
Presenting what to do and what not to do:
One of the things I learnt is that sometimes less is more. For presentations in such settings you need to decide on what your driving point is and what message you want to deliver. This was evident in the session on climate change chaired by SANParks scientist Nicola van Wilgen which was well received. She first introduced the scenario based planning and the RAD framework approaches. She then went on to give examples on how they have started to use these approaches creating scenarios in some of the South African National Parks. This lead to an interesting Q&A session, most people being interested in using the scenario-based climate change adaptations for the other protected areas. I felt that the climate change talks were well planned and executed. What I also learnt about presenting is that one should try not to put too many slides they won’t have time to go through. It is important to pace and time your presentation to avoid going over-time and having to be cut down before you get your message across to the audience. Putting less text and more visuals, proved effectual.
What was cool about the symposium?
Lots of interesting projects were presented in the symposium touching on both terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity. The project that piqued my interest was the EKZNW Turtle Monitoring Project presented by Santosh Bachoo. It was interesting to hear that the turtle monitoring project is expanding and they are now tapping into the acoustic telemetry as they have partnered with the Acoustic Tracking Array Platform (ATAP) to possibly answer the unknowns on the turtle distribution.
The platform was not only for the conservation practitioners and scientists but there were students and interns from various institutions who gave talks on the projects they are working on that contribute to the monitoring of biodiversity. Most of the students work was baseline studies which have proved to be useful for the organisations when doing their monitoring. For example, a student, Thami Wanda did a project “Seabed architectural influence on shelf biodiversity: Integrating multibeam bathymetric maps into marine spatial initiatives” within the uThukela Banks Marine Protected Area, which helped scientists from Wildtrust to identify suitable sites to deploy B/RUVs.
The symposium provided an opportunity for sharing of ideas, lessons and solutions. There were successes applauded like the publication of the White Paper on Conservation and Sustainable Use of South Africa’s Biodiversity. The White Paper is seen as the right tool towards reaching the Global Diversity Framework Targets. Another tool that I saw as the “right” tool is the MPA Guide which is used to track the current MPA status which can be used with the METT. There were also concerns raised with management in some protected areas such as the species rich Ndumo Game Reserve. There was people who were interested in finding out more about the Ndumo Game Reserve issues and see what can be the solutions. These highlighted to me the benefit of the Conservation Symposium as a platform to share ideas, lessons, and solutions to conservation.
I am super grateful for the opportunity to attend the symposium, I definitely see myself attending the symposium in future and participate in one of the sessions giving a presentation.
