Meet our Team
This growing team is actively coordinating progress across the core activities of the School for Climate Studies
Leadership & Administrative Staff
Prof Guy Midgley
Acting Director: School for Climate Studies
Distinguished Professor: Department of Botany and Zoology
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Guy Midgley has worked in the fields of global change and biodiversity science since the 1980s, including a 32-year career at the South African National Biodiversity Institute. He took up a Professorship at Stellenbosch University (Botany and Zoology) in 2014. He has held lead roles in international scientific assessments (IPCC 4th, 5th and 6th Assessments, CBD ad hoc Technical Expert Group, and IPBES Global Assessments) and national level syntheses for climate change policy guidance. With over 170 publications, he holds an NRF A-rating, has been a Thomson Reuters highly cited researcher (2014), and is rated amongst the top 200 most influential climate change scientists globally (2021). He is a holder of the SA Royal Society Marloth Medal and Humboldt Foundation Research Award for lifetime science contributions.
Yolanda Chirango
Scientific Network Manager
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Yolanda has a background in evolutionary ecology. She completed her MSc in Biological Sciences focusing on pollination ecology at the University of Cape Town. After her MSc she joined the Stellenbosch University Global Change Biology Group as the Africa Regional Project Coordinator for the GEF-funded project SPARC (Spatial Planning for Protected Areas in Response to Climate Change). Yolanda is passionate about building connections and promoting transdisciplinary research. She organizes and facilitates multi-disciplinary expert and stakeholder workshops while also running the Climate Studies Student Network (CSSN) which includes postgraduate students from 17 African countries. She is a member of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity Committee. As an advocate for inclusive scientific spaces her recent research focuses on equity and empowerment of African scientists in international collaborative partnerships.
Suzaan Kritzinger-Klopper
Chief Technical Officer
Suzaan Kritzinger-Klopper is the Chief Technical Officer of the C·I·B and School for Climate Studies. In assisting the core team members and their students, Suzaan is the overall responsible person for field work and equipment. She is also the liaison for permits, landowners and all other parties. Her main area of interest is in fynbos botanical diversity, and she helps with basic plant identification.
Researchers
Prof Susana Clusella-Trullas
Physiological Ecologist
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Prof Clusella-Trullas’ research focuses on understanding how species respond to climate variability via behaviour, phenotypic plasticity and evolutionary change. She leads the CL•I•M•E research group and uses a combination of theoretical, experimental and field approaches to build a predictive understanding of how ectotherms, such as reptiles and insects, will respond further to ongoing climate change. Her interests also include the interactive effects of climate change and biological invasions on native diversity. She has led and co-authored several key analyses of patterns of physiological traits at global scales and strives to develop methods that can be used by managers to reliably assess vulnerability of species to thermal stress.
Prof Sophie Von der Heyden
Marine Molecular Ecologist
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Prof von der Heyden is a marine molecular ecologist. Her research is by necessity broad, but primarily focusses on the conservation and sustainable utilisation of species and the marine environment. Her particular interests lie in the applicability of molecular ecological and genomics tools to inform marine spatial planning, resilience and adaptation of marine species to ongoing and future change, as well as the impacts of changing marine communities on society. She is also the Lead Investigator on a national project on the conservation and restoration of seagrass ecosystems in South Africa.
Dr Romain Pirard
Environmental Economist
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Romain Pirard holds a PhD in Environmental Economics with twe nty years of experience in various contexts such as international organizations (CIFOR, World Bank) and NGOs (IUCN, Greenpeace), research & development organizations (CIRAD, CERDI), think tanks (IDDRI), consultancy (ONFI) and bilateral cooperation (French Embassy). His research has focused on deforestation dynamics in the tropics, various approaches to sustainable forest management and the provision of ecosystem services and the role of commodities supply chains, with a specialisation in Indonesia. He is now involved in developing research on the economics of land use for climate change mitigation and adaptation as well as the challenges and opportunities of the Just Energy Transition in South Africa.
Dr Christian Lueme
Planetary and Public Health Medical Researcher
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Dr. Lokotola Christian Lueme has a strong interest in climate change and health risk. His research area covers climate change, air pollution and health, sustainable urban health, and climate change migration and human health. His approach focuses on the quantification and prediction of the magnitude of health risk and uncertainties of health care resilience to climate change and air pollution. His current research focuses on planetary health education and integration of planetary health into primary health care and patient care.
Prof Pedro Monteiro
Oceanographer
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Prof Monteiro is newly based at the School for Climate Studies where he leads the emerging research area of Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR), a key global and regional science and governance policy challenge towards and beyond net-zero emissions. This reflects his interests in building a better understanding of how regional and global natural carbon sinks and ecosystems and carbon-climate-ecosystem feedbacks are linked and help impact the efficacy and sound policy development for the necessary negative emissions in the 21st Century. It builds on his longer term focus on the role of fine scale ocean physics on carbon fluxes in the Southern Ocean and its impact on the uncertainties in the carbon budget and long term carbon-climate projections. He was co-Coordinating Lead Author (CLA) for Chapter 5 – Carbon and Biogeochemical Feedbacks – of the IPCC AR6 – WG1 and Chief Oceanographer and head of the SOCCO programme at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).
Research Associates
Dr Wendy Foden
Associate Professor: Stellenbosch University
Head: Cape Research Centre, South African National Parks
Chair: IUCN Species Survival Commission, Climate Change Specialist Group
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Wendy’s research focuses on climate change vulnerability and adaptation in natural systems. As a researcher in SANBI’s Climate Change and Biodiversity Group, Wendy studied Namib Desert Quiver Trees and documented some of the first evidence of climate change impacts in arid ecosystems and on plants. She led SANBI’s Threatened Species Programme (2003-2007) where she initiated several Red Listing, atlasing and monitoring projects, and founded a scholarship for research on threatened species conservation. Thereafter, she initiated and led the IUCN Global Species Programme’s Climate Change Unit, based in Cambridge, UK (2007-2013) where she led development of the IUCN’s best-practice guidelines for assessing species’ vulnerability to climate change. Wendy recently won IUCN’s George Rabb award for innovative conservation and the British Ecological Society’s Marsh award for outstanding climate change research. In her role as head of the Cape Research Centre at South African National Parks, she leads development of the organisation’s Climate Change Preparedness strategy, including development of park-level vulnerability assessments, adaptation planning and ongoing climate change monitoring.
Dr Nicola Stevens
Trapnell Fellow for African Systems, ECI, Oxford University
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Nikki’s research interests are centred around understanding vegetation dynamics in African savannas and how they are likely to change given increasing global change pressures like altered fire and herbivory regimes against a backdrop of changing CO2 concentrations. Along this vein she has become particularly interested in the phenomenon of woody encroachment where open ecosystems across the tropics are being invaded by native woody species. It has also driven her to improve our ability to predict future species ranges under global change by improving our mechanistic understanding of range edges in disturbance limited systems. She is currently based at the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University but has ongoing projects in Southern Africa with the hopes to expand this research to other tropical savannas.
Postdoctoral Research Fellows
Dr Heath Beckett
Heath is an ecologist interested in vegetation mosaics, extreme events, vegetation dynamics, pattern formation and the spatial processes involved. He is particularly interested in understanding the enigmatic occurrence of ‘fire-sensitive’ forest vegetation in fire prone landscapes (savannas). His post-doc research focuses on understanding and communicating climate impacts in the context of multiple stable ecological states by developing and testing predictive models for species and ecosystem-level responses to, and changes under climate change and climate variability, in multiple state ecosystems. The aims being to (1) link predictive models within a multi-disciplinary environment, particularly through a resource economics approach, to support relevant management responses for adaptation and mitigation and (2) to identify and explore likely mechanisms underpinning the impacts of changing climate and ecological states on the production, ecosystem services and ecological processes in multiple state ecosystems.
Dr Andrew Ndlovu
Andrew has a background in bioinformatics and molecular ecology, and his research interests are seagrass ecological transcriptomics and seagrass as a nature-based climate solution. He is using ecological transcriptomics to investigate the functional responses of the dominant and endangered seagrass species in Southern Africa, Zostera capensis, under climate change scenarios through laboratory experiments. Seagrasses are increasingly recognized as globally significant blue carbon stocks. Andrew’s post-doctoral work also focuses on measuring blue carbon stocks in meadows of Z. capensis. Such data are useful in understanding the seagrass’s role in climate change mitigation and adaptation, highlighting their importance and the urgency for their conservation. He is particularly interested in investigating the biotic and abiotic drivers of the variability in measured seagrass blue carbon stocks.
Dr Andrew Watson
Andrew is a hydrologist specialising in isotope hydrology, hydrological and groundwater modelling, with a focus on understanding groundwater recharge and aquifer baseflow in semi-arid environments. He has experience with surface water modelling software (J2000, ACRU, Pitman and SCS) vadose zone modelling (HYDRUS), groundwater modelling (MODFLOW) and is developing a new set of isotope enabled models (J2000iso). He has worked on building new hydrological models that incorporate a more detailed representation of groundwater components, which are needed to understand resources available for agricultural and domestic use. He has technical experience with setting up meteorological systems and has helped to develop the SASSCAL monitoring network for the west coast.
Dr Jonathan Müller
Jonathan has a background in environmental sciences and did a PhD at the Weizmann Institute of Science, studying tree energy management under extreme drought and the poorly understood leaf-scale mechanism at the basis of non-evaporative canopy cooling. This mechanism is crucial for the continued existence of forests under a warmer and drier climate. During this project, he designed, built and deployed entire novel measurement systems in harsh field conditions and developed advanced data processing techniques and substantially. His postdoc research is to scale up from trees to ecosystem carbon and energy fluxes in a study with a unique comparison between the climate change mitigation potential of different land use scenarios, with the aim to identify the balance between climate warming and cooling effects of land use changes. Through his wide set of interests, Jonathan has gathered a range of skills from scientific to technical skills (including programming, sensor development), and in his free time he enjoys travelling and photography.
PhD Students
Felix Skhosana
Department of Botany and Zoology
Woody encroachment is one of the most significant and complex phenomena impacting ecosystem functioning and services in arid and semi-arid savannas and grasslands worldwide. Felix’s project is therefore, looking at the dynamics of woody encroachment and its impact on ecosystem processes and services. It gives a global view on the impacts of woody encroachment on ecosystem services through a systematic review. It then narrows down to mapping woody encroachment hotspots in South Africa using remotely sensed aboveground woody biomass and canopy cover under the theory that areas of high woody encroachment are characterised by low woody biomass and high canopy cover. Due to a growing concern that woody encroachment may result in less water availability for plants and groundwater recharge we then investigate the impact on rainfall partitioning, into throughfall, stemflow and interception across a gradient of encroachment by Terminalia sericea and Dichrostachys cinerea at Wits Rural Facility in the Limpopo Province. Studies done in forests have shown that a significant amount of rainfall is lost through canopy interception, however, there is still a huge gap of such studies in encroached dry systems. He then concludes by upscaling these site-level results in time and space by using the adaptive Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (aDGVM).
Amukelani Maluleke
Department of Botany and Zoology
Amukelani is working on carbon dioxide, water and turbulent energy exchanges between Nama-Karoo and Savanna type vegetation and the atmosphere. His project aims to improve the quantitative understanding of key ecosystem processes to characterise their temporal responses to variations in biophysical inputs (rainfall, temperature, radiation) with the application of the Eddy Covariance flux measurements and remotely-sensed vegetation indices. Linking these two measurement approaches allows the study to improve the spatial coverage of vegetation response assessments of semi-arid ecosystems and ultimately inform decision making about prioritising resource allocation towards climate change resilience in South Africa. He has three flux tower sites: Skukuza and Malopeni in the Kruger National Park; Benfontein in the Free State; and Middleburg in the Eastern Cape.
Zuzi Nyareli
Department of Botany and Zoology
According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, ecological infrastructure is increasingly being destroyed or transformed around the world, with detrimental implications for human well-being. At the heart of this deterioration is the changing land cover due to unsustainable land-use practices aiming at meeting the economic development needs of the country. Ecological Infrastructure (EI) as specified by the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) refers to naturally functioning ecosystems that provide valuable services to people, such as water and climate control, soil formation, and disaster risk reduction. Monitoring the long-term impacts of land cover change on the EI can provide a valuable starting point for understanding how the EI facilitates the delivery of ecosystem services over time. Zuzi aims to quantify the impacts of land cover change and climate change in Duiwenhoks catchment, Southern Cape, South Africa, over the past seven decades.
Maanda Raselabe
Department of Botany and Zoology
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Maanda’s PhD is focused on assessing the overall performance of semi-arid C4 grasses and their potential distribution under changing climate conditions. This will be achieved by measuring their gross primary productivity response to different environmental variables, assessing their eco-physiological responses to different temperature and water regimes, as well using modelling techniques to determine their potential distribution pattens. He aims to determine what the key drivers of primary production in C4 grasses are and how this productivity may change under temperature and water stress. He asks the question, what are some of the main climatic determinants on C4 grass distribution and how may this change in future based on their physiological niches? He will be using Eddy covariance flux towers, ground-based vegetation indices and greenhouse experiments to address these questions.
MSc Students
Nosipho Gqaleni
Department of Botany and Zoology
Nosipho is studying the seasonal patterns of rainfall, soil moisture and related ecosystem water use efficiency in a semi-arid Nama Karoo landscape comprised of dwarf C3 shrubs and C4 grasses. Her study focuses on determining whether the soil moisture regime and related vegetation evapotranspiration response in the Eastern-Karoo is driven by rainfall seasonality or by specific rainfall events. She aims to describe the seasonal patterns of ecosystem evapotranspiration and determine the most efficient model to predict evapotranspiration from climatic data. She will also be developing a bucket model for this system to simulate soil moisture patterns at two depths. Her study intends to fill the knowledge gap about soil moisture regimes and ecosystem evapotranspiration in this semi-arid region.
Yenziwe Mbuyisa
Department of Botany and Zoology
Yenziwe is an environmental scientist honours graduate from Rhodes University. Her interest in tree physiology and climate change have lead her to pursue a masters degree, in collaboration with Professor David Drew from the department of Foresrty and Wood science and the Eucxylo Group, looking at the effects of temperature and water availability on the water use efficiency and C isotopic discrimination of two myrtacea species, Eucalyptus grandis and Syzyguim guineense. This project is in response to the increasing movement of climate change mitigation through global tree afforestation/reforestation programs. With the likelihood of increasingly frequent and severe droughts and heat waves being a major cause for concern, understanding how trees respond to temperature extremes and limited water availability is critical to forecasting both short and long-term impacts of climate change on forest systems in South Africa.
Christopher Tonkin
Department of Botany and Zoology
Eucalypts are some of the fastest growing and most productive trees. This could potentially make them a viable option for removing CO2 from the atmosphere and helping to mitigate the effects of climate change. However, the basis for their high productivity is not yet well understood but it has been noted that their productivity rates are often limited by drought conditions. Chris’ project is focused on studying the physiological processes of carbon uptake, biomass allocation and water use efficiency between a fast-growing varietal (Eucalyptus grandis x longirostrata) and a drought tolerant varietal (Corymbia henryii x torelliana) of Eucalyptus. He will further explore how temperature increases and drought conditions will affect these physiological processes in a semi-controlled greenhouse study.
Olivia Jones
Department of Botany and Zoology
Olivia is in the first year of her Master’s Degree in Botany. Her research project “Megaherbivore trophic rewilding for top down herbivore control: A test-case in a semi-arid savanna.” will combine remote sensing techniques with field and lab data to investigate what impact megaherbivore rewilding has had on the vegetation structure in the semi-arid savanna region of Tswalu Kalahari Reserve, South Africa. This study will contribute to the field of trophic rewilding by providing the hypothesis testing and science-based monitoring approaches called for in the literature. It is pertinent that this study is being conducted in a savanna, as the ecosystem services provided by this biome are threatened by processes that have come about, in part, from loss of herbivore guilds, such as bush encroachment.
Aisha Rifai
Department of Botany and Zoology
Aisha’s research project “Vegetation and predator-prey dynamics at the Tswalu Kalahari Reserve, in the South African savanna.” is an expansion of her honour’s project, which looked at the influence of lions on the vegetation productivity at the Tswalu Kalahari Reserve (TKR). But unlike the honour’s project, which was a complete remote study, this project will incorporate a hybrid approach consisting of remote sensing (RS) and fieldwork to assess the impact of predation by lions on vegetation growth. A 20-year period will again be investigated via RS methods. The RS portion will focus on environmental aspects, including vegetation index, drought index, fire and carbon influxes, and the changes in land use. The fieldwork will incorporate Landscape of Fear (LoF) modeling to quantify the effect lions exert on prey species. The main aim of this study is to statistically demonstrate the significance the presence of lions has on vegetation in a reserve. This information is vital in understanding the role predators play as ecosystem health indicators, and especially to reserves when reintroducing predators.
Kayleigh Murray
Department of Botany and Zoology
Kayleigh Murray is a masters student in the Global Change Biology Group building a project that will use genomics to study historical range shifts of the climate change sentinel species Aloidendron dichotomum, or quiver tree. In collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the School for Climate Studies, this project will provide much needed insight into the health of quiver tree populations as temperatures increase across their range. Kayleigh is interested in streamlining species and ecosystem climate change response monitoring through the use of advanced genomics techniques and machine-learning computational modelling – methods that have been out of reach to institutions in the global south due to high cost and lack of training. Kayleigh hopes to make these methods more accessible for the advancement of conservation biology in Africa. Born in Gaborone, Botswana, Kayleigh gained their honours degree at Stellenbosch University, and recently finished their internship at the SU Botanical Garden.
Gaylen Carelse
Department of Botany and Zoology
In her MSc project, Gaylen aims to assess the temperature tolerance of different life stages of the invasive coccinellid beetle, Harmonia axyridis. She examines how life stage-specific microclimates mediate the realized survival of a local population in semi-urban areas around Stellenbosch. Insects have fascinating, yet complex life cycles and the temperature tolerance of mobile stages, such as larvae and adults, are likely to differ from those of immobile stages, such as eggs and pupae. While temperature tolerance has been examined in many invasive insects, there is limited understanding of how temperature affects survival across life-stages in these species. Her study in the CL•I•M•E lab aims to increase knowledge of thermal tolerance throughout ontogeny in this invasive insect while considering the temperatures experienced in the field.
Gerhard Wiese
Department of Botany and Zoology
Gerhard is a MSc student within the CL•I•M•E research group focusing on lizard physiology, specifically temperature effects on their rates of water loss. Using flow-through respirometry he is measuring the amount of water vapor expelled through the skin and the respiratory system of the lizards. He is also aiming to determine how the partitioning of water loss differs with increasing ambient temperatures. Physiological studies, such as those measuring the temperature sensitivity of water loss rate, are important for understanding how these organisms respond to environmental conditions experienced in nature. Relating these water loss rates to temperature and body size will provide key information for enhancing predictive mechanistic models of vulnerability of lizards to climate change.
Honours Students
Erin Ramsey
Department of Botany and Zoology
Erin is a currently completing her honours degree with Prof Guy Midgley as her primary supervisor. She is investigating water and carbon flux of three dominant Proteaceae species in the Jonkershoek catchment over the course of the day, as well as how these patterns fluctuate through the year. Since there is also a water and carbon flux tower in this area, she will be comparing these results to the overall footprint of this section of Jonkershoek. This will allow her to determine the efficiency of these species with regards to water and carbon use, as well as how they fit in their respective ecological niches.
This area of study may be able to contribute to the understanding of water and carbons budgets of these species, which will be important to understand how they may react to the predicted change in climate, in the future.
Marc Butler
Department of Botany and Zoology
Marc is currently completing his honours under the supervision of Guy and Heath. He will be researching how the different modes of predation have influenced herbivore behavior and vegetation dynamics in Tswalu Kalahari Reserve over the past 20 years. Apex predators can have confounding effects on ecosystems, both direct and indirect, which involve very complex processes. However, there are very few studies that deal with this question, especially in savanna ecosystems. Understanding these effects can serve as an important tool to reserve managers and conservationists, in order to maintain a healthy and functioning ecosystem.
Jody Thorburn
Department of Botany and Zoology
My name is Jody Thorburn, and I am currently doing my honours degree under the supervision of Prof. Susana Clusella-Trullas. My research project is focused on assessing the implications of applying generalised techniques, such as allometric relationships, to predict lizard surface area when estimating rates of water loss. To do so, I am capturing the surface area of a large diversity of lizards using a novel 3D scanning technique, and use the results to calculate how much error is generated from the frequently used generic equations. Additionally, the implications of erroneous surface area measurements on water loss rate estimations will be assessed. Climate change is intensifying at an unprecedented rate, increasing species’ vulnerability to extinction – especially ectotherms. Thus, the findings of this study may be able to contribute to improving estimations of lizard vulnerability to increasing climate change, and provide future researchers with a novel, accurate technique to capture surface area when studying water/heat loss in lizards, and possibly many other organisms.
Interns
Tegan gibaud
Media Intern
Tegan Gibaud is currently a third year Biodiversity and Ecology student at Stellenbosch University with the direction of honours with Professor Guy Midgley and the Global Change Biology Group in 2023. As media intern, Tegan coordinates promotional material, online social media accounts, blog and article content as well as photography of events. She also does general work such as organising events. Outside of the School for Climate Studies, Tegan is the SDG Executive of UNASA Stellenbosch’s society where she coordinates events, shares educational information and makes sustainability accessible amongst the student population.
eda ekinci
Personal Assistant Intern to the Director
My name is Eda Ekinci and I am a second-year international student studying BA Humanities at Stellenbosch University. I have recently become a House Committee Member for my residence on campus and my portfolios are Sustainability and Social Impact as well as Women Empowerment. I was also chosen as Chairperson for UNASA (United Nations Association of South Africa) a prominent volunteering society on campus.