Spatiotemporal dynamics of landscapes : urban transitions for a sustainable future

Professor Barend Erasmus from the Global Change Institute at Wits will present this talk.

Erasmus is one of South Africa’s leading experts in the field of climate change, spatial ecology and land cover change. The Africa of the future is an urban Africa.  The processes that determine the nature, pace and degree of urbanisation, in different places are complex, and varied. The one common thread, though, is the transition from rural-dominated to urban-dominated environments and structures. In an attempt to untangle the causality in complex social-ecological systems (SES) that sets the scene for these transitions, Erasmus and his team rely on long term data on settlements patterns, natural resource use, human demography and environmental variability. At a rural savanna field station in the eastern Lowveld savanna of South Africa, they used a combination of remotely sensed data and detailed household-level field studies spanning 50 years of data collection, to understand energy and food In this talk, Erasmus will synthesise the findings of 11 researchers over 13 years of research at a rural savanna field station , and explore the policy and management implications from these long-term spatiotemporal studies on ecosystems and urban patterns.

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