In line with the vision of the North-West University’s (NWU’s) Unit for Environmental Sciences and Management (UESM) in the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences, experts are conducting research that is not only fundamental and applied, but also market-orientated.
Located in Potchefstroom, the UESM supports the optimal utilisation of natural resources within the limitations of ecosystem resilience. Currently research is conducted in eight subprogrammes: Climate Change, Air Quality and Impacts; Aquatic Ecosystem Health; Biodiversity and Conservation Ecology; Ecological Interactions and Ecosystem Resilience; Environmental Management; Integrated Pest Management; Geology Soil Science, and Spatial Planning and Implementation.
Most recent articles and books
This year during the International Association for Impact Assessment (IAIA) conference in Durban, the definitive text on environmental management in South Africa entitled "Environmental Management in South Africa", edited by the UESM's Prof Francois Retief and Prof Nick Kings, was officially launched. This book represents a big team effort with a total of 11 authors from the NWU contributing to it: eight authors from the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences and three from the Faculty of Law. This is by far the majority in terms of university representation and just another example of how the NWU has established itself as a clear leader in environmental management teaching and research.
Dr Christo Coetzee and Prof Dewald van Niekerk recently published an article in the Environmental Hazards Journal entitled “Should all disaster risk be reduced? A perspective from the systems concept of edge of Chaos”. This article has taken a first step into questioning the foundations of the field of disaster risk reduction. The value of the paper and the critical questions it ask has been recognised by the International Sociological Association by accepting Dr Coetzee and Prof Van Niekerk to host an entire panel session, titled, "Can disaster risk be useful?" at the upcoming XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology, in Toronto, Canada from 15-21 July 2018.
A review paper published by the Aquatic and Applied Microbiology Research Group lead by Prof Carlos Bezuidenhout dealt with the utilisation of databases and models in the drinking water sector. This is an aspect that is used internationally but not yet in the South African context. The advantages of this approach is highlighted in this review paper. In addition this group also published exciting new genomes for South African bacterial species in the highly rated Genome Announcements Journal of American Society for Microbiology. One of the species is a pathogen of maize that for a long time was thought to have been introduced to some other part of the world. Our whole genome sequences, when compared to other ones, suggest that the South African pathogen is different. This opens up various avenues for collaboration with local (University of Pretoria, Agricultural Research Council) and international plant pathologist and agricultural hygiene specialists.
One of the faculty’s postdoctoral fellows, Dr Ruan Gerber from the Water Research Group in the Aquatic Ecosystem Health Sub-Programme, together with Prof Victor Wepener, Prof Nico Smit, Prof Yoshinori Ikenaka and Prof Van Vuren, published the first paper in Africa that conclusively showed that African tiger fish in the Kruger National Park rivers respond to organic chlorine pesticide exposure. This paper on biomarker responses in tiger fish was published in the prestigious journal Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety.
Bheki Maliba, a PhD student supervised by Dr Jacques Berner, successfully published his first article in the Journal of Integrative Agriculture 2018, 17(5): 1137-1144. The title of his paper was: The effect of ozone and drought on the photosynthetic performance of canola.
