Silent Stories

On the surface, a "field site" might just seem to be a location where you search for study animals, sample your vegetation species of interest, or take soil samples. You then write a paper, telling the story of how you investigated your hypothesis and what answer you found.

But field sites have their own stories too.

Last week Greg Forsyth ( who works with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, CSIR) and I peered back in time. We dug back through aerial photographs of the Berg River catchment, filed away in a dusty cabinet in a musty little back room.

We were hunting for the story of this field site.

What we found was extremely interesting.

We knew the area around the dam had been planted with pines for a long time, but we didn't realize that the extensive plantations had existed as early as the 1940s. Between the 1940s and about 2000, these plantations had been harvested and replanted several times. Not only that, but the pines got out of control and invaded the unplanted fynbos.

In certain areas, the transformation was striking.

See the photograph below, of the upper reaches of the Berg River in 1966. Look at the light gray area of unplanted fynbos in the red circle.

 

Now see the same area in 1977.

 

Invaded by pines, in just ten years. (The plantations around it had recently been cut and would be replanted).

The dam wasn't built until 2008, but by 1999 Cape Pine (the timber company) was finally pulling out, and Working for Water stepped in to begin clearing in 2002. When Manfred Paulsen took over management of the clearing activities in 2003, he was determined to do a thorough eradication not only of the pines, but also of acacia species that had invaded along the Berg River.

 

Over the last ten to fifteen years, he and his teams meticulously felled the pines, and because acacias resprout, cut them down and herbicided individuals (rather than broadcast spraying, which could potentially harm native species). They try to follow up these clearing activities twice a year. The transformation has been amazing.

In one valley where there had formerly been plantations, an indigenous plant thought to be gone for ten or twenty years reappeared.

And we will tell this story....