Drylands: Africa
Introduction
According to the United Nations, drylands cover approximately 41% of the Earth’s land surface, including many of the world’s poorest countries, and support more than two billion people. Land degradation affects one third of the Earth’s land surface and threatens the health and livelihoods of more than 1 billion people. Two international conventions, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) are particularly relevant to the drylands of Africa. Members of the Drylands Africa Group have had input to the UNCCD/CBD Joint Work Programme on the Biological Diversity of Dry and Sub-Humid Lands and RBG Kew’s definition of drylands follows that of the UNCCD/CBD Joint Work Programme, therefore incorporating not just hyper-arid to semi-arid biomes but also Mediterranean-type, savanna and grassland ecosystems, all of which are characterised by water stress at some time of the year. Two thirds of Africa’s land surface area is desert and dryland, and 73% of its agricultural drylands are already severely or moderately degraded.
The objective of the Drylands Africa team is to continue improving the quality of Kew collections; to improve our African partners’ access to information on their own plant biodiversity; and to improve the understanding of this plant biodiversity through collaborative projects, leading to sustainable use and effective conservation.
Our vision is to see a wide range of species and vegetation types conserved and sustainably used within Africa, through the use of the best available information by our African partners and others. Our strategy, therefore, is to make Kew's botanical information (both collections and expertise) much more widely available to a broad range of potential users, and to build on Kew's institutional strengths and expertise. This, of course, requires close collaboration with our African partners, particularly in areas of high diversity that are being threatened by agricultural conversion, over-use of natural vegetation and other man-made threats.
Currently we have a diverse range of collaborators in Africa and our contacts are spread across the whole of the continent; research is often focused at a national level, but several projects are regional in scale. The diversity of contacts in Africa is a unique Kew strength and one we should both treasure and continue to develop. Because we work in so many countries in Africa we can provide an overview of botanical issues and provide comparative data; this is often difficult to do from a national level within Africa.
Specific goals are:
Collections: to improve our collections and those of our sister herbaria with which we have close links, focusing on areas that are under-collected and/or of high conservation interest, and plant groups that are under-represented.
Baseline plant diversity research: to complete Flora of Tropical East Africa and Flora Zambesiaca, and to move on to field guides and conservation checklists – in close collaboration with local colleagues, and in response to the wishes of our stakeholders in Africa; and to compile and disseminate botanical information, including the establishment and development of our databases on plant information: SEPASAL, PROTA, the African Wild Harvest programme and the African Plants Initiative.
Comparative plant biology: molecular work to underpin taxonomy of larger and/or complicated genera; continue to link conservation planning with the phylogenetic data; calculate extinction risks for taxa within South Africa’s three biodiversity hotspots, building on the complete Red List for the South African flora (to be published imminently by IUCN); provide baseline data for the development of future conservation actions within current partnerships and to develop new partnerships, and extend the use of DNA resources to DNA barcoding for conservation (for example, at the Kruger National Park).
Conservation: to establish core holdings of dryland plant species’ seed, and to improve our knowledge of propagation of the seed; in conjunction with our taxonomic work, continue to publish conservation assessments, environmental and habitat assessments, some of which by using phylogenetic and DNA barcoding information. As we develop our strategy for the future we will consider how this knowledge can be used to support some of the conservation strategies being developed within the African continent.
Capacity building: (for example staff training, both individually and through group courses, biotechnology, DNA banking and DNA barcoding) including collaboration with, and involvement in, transborder capacity-building projects such as the South African Botanical Diversity Network (SABONET), the Botanical and Zoological Network of East Africa (BOZONET), and the Darwin Initiative ‘DNA banking, phylogeny and conservation of the South African Flora’.