Ecosystem services and conservation in Tofo Mozambique

Ecosystem Services

The Scientific Journal called “Ecosystem services” is a very widely read and respected international journal covering issues that relate to… you guessed it… “ecosystem services”. To publish an article in this journal you need to do some unique scientific investigation, write it up in a scientific way with facts and figures and get it accepted by the journal as something relevant and interesting. Together with two colleagues from the University of Florida, Susan Jacobson and Bob McCleery, I have just published an article in this journal entitled:

Assessing contributions of volunteer tourism to ecosystem research and conservation in southern Africa

In this article, we explain the topic of volunteer tourism and take a look at how important it is in general and then more specifically for nature conservation in southern Africa. We conclude that volunteer tourism is a big deal and has grown in importance quickly over the past twenty years. We show that volunteer tourism offers many opportunities for doing good, particularly in under-funded areas such as Eswatini/Eswatini and Mozambique, but it can also have some negative impacts. Despite this, there have been few scientific studies that evaluate the outputs of volunteer tourism programs.

In this article, we take a look at the volunteers of a model volunteer tourism operation in southern Africa – our very own All Out Africa! We looked at the information of 2,085 volunteer tourists who had joined All Out Africa over a period of 8 years. We found that 77% were female, 59% were aged 17-22 years and 63% were from Europe.

Students at the Savannah Research Centre in Eswatini (Eswatini)

Volunteer Tourism

We surveyed 304 of these volunteers to find out more about their experience and their motivations. We found that:

97% would recommend the experience
98% were motivated by gaining new skills and knowledge
88% were motivated by helping people
74% were motivated by helping the environment

In this article, we look at the outputs and inputs over an 8 year period of two of All Out Africa’s conservation projects – the Savannah project in Eswatini/Eswatini and marine project in Mozambique. Over 15,154 volunteer days were spent on these projects during this period. Outputs during this period include 52 scientific publications and 51 conservation actions that are listed in detail.

Conservation volunteers studying ecosystem services in Eswatini (Eswatini)

Conservation Impact

In this article, we present the project outputs in a framework to evaluate their conservation impact. We recommend that this framework can be applied to other programs to help make better assessments of how much good volunteer tourism projects are actually doing. We also present guidelines on how to do a better job of running volunteer tourism projects so that they do more good.

University students researching ecosystem services in southern Africa

The conclusion of this article is that volunteer tourism can make an important contribution to research and conservation, particularly in under-resourced regions but a lot depends on how it is managed. We hope it makes a useful contribution. For recent articles in the Journal of Ecosystem Services visit their website. The reference for this paper is:

Roques, KG, Jacobson, SK, & McCleery, RA, (2018). Assessing contributions of volunteer tourism to ecosystem research and conservation in southern Africa. Ecosystem Services 30. DOI: 10.1016/j.ecoser.2017.12.014

Winter and summer surveys were carried out, comprising 540 min of bird surveys; 1080 Sherman traps to survey small mammals such as mice, rats and shrews; 60 motion triggered cameras to survey predators, ungulates and other large mammals, and finally, 54 bat detectors were deployed twice a year. Vegetation surveys were paired with the animal surveys, where grass biomass, shrub cover, ground cover and some palatable and alien species were measured. These surveys were carried out in Mbuluzi Game Reserve, Mlawula Nature Reserve and Hlane Royal National Park (which form part of the Lubombo Conservancy) by All Out Africa staff working at our Savannah Research Centre.

Putting up the camera’s with a group of university students.

The aim of these surveys is to identify the different animals that inhabit these regions, the abundance or lack of them, and how their numbers fluctuate through time and different environmental phenomena such as droughts, bush fires, heavy rains, etc.

The species most commonly sighted on the camera traps were: impala, nyala, kudu, blue wildebeest, bushbuck, waterbuck and grey duiker. Others commonly seen were giraffe, zebra, chacma baboon, vervet monkey, warthog and many different bird species. Sightings by tourists and management of all these animals are frequent as most of their activity is carried out during daylight hours.

However, the most exciting pictures these camera traps capture, are the nocturnal animals that are not commonly spotted, as they tend to be secretive and active at times when most of us are sleeping. These animals captured by the cameras include: porcupine, aardvark, large-spotted genet, black-backed jackal, and bush pig. More rarely captured nocturnal animals were white-tailed mongoose, spotted hyena, and thick-tailed bush baby.

Even more exciting are some special pictures that just stick out from the rest, and these are the ones that when coming back to the center after a long, hot day, and being full of ticks, makes all your effort worth it when you switch on the generator, take the SD card out of the cameras and go through hundreds of pictures of grass moving right and left, and all of the sudden a picture of a leopard comes up!

Hlane Royal National Park is the largest reserve on the area, and although management had a good suspicion there were a couple of leopards on the property they hadn’t actually seen them, so these set of pictures is irrefutable proof of leopard still roaming free in the Lubombo Conservancy and if more pictures could be obtained in the future, identification of individuals could be performed by the pattern of spots on their coats, giving us better information on the number of leopards still inhabiting Eswatini.

All of these pictures give us important data to provide policy makers and conservation managers in Eswatini with information in order to take decisions regarding wildlife and conservation.

Written by: Gabriela Benavides (SRC Co-ordinator)