Web report by Karin Mahony (Team Grasslands).
We were excited to arrive at a new location for our Catchments, Rivers, and Wetlands module on Friday afternoon. The weekend was held at Kgaswane Nature Reserve in Rustenburg. Despite large areas of the reserve being burned by a recent veld fire, we were all amazed at the beauty of the place, which was relatively unknown to most of us – and is right on the doorstep of both Pretoria and Johannesburg.
We enjoyed temperatures ranging from 11 to 29 Degrees C., clear skies, very low humidity, and visibility beyond 15 kilometers for the entire weekend.
On Friday night, under the stars, and with the help of a projector and a screen, we went through the formatting details, for our soon to be started written assignments, and the academic complexities of referencing correctly.
On Saturday morning, we started with Peter giving us a brief introductory lecture on the properties of water and the functions and importance of wetlands. We were then tasked to test the quality of the water of the Kgaswane streams using visual and chemical testing methods.
The teams eagerly got to work and performed numerous tests, including assessing the catchment and site quality, measuring the depth, width, and speed of river flow and determining water temperature and turbidity.
Various chemical tests were also performed, including testing for PH, Nitrites and Nitrates, hardness, and chlorine.
Another short lecture in the afternoon in a makeshift, semi-outdoor classroom was followed by creating our own mini wetlands using a plastic bottle, sand, stones, and grass.
Each wetland model was tested to determine which team had built the most effective micro wetland, and there is still some debate as to which team actually won!
The interesting and fun day ended with a beautiful sundowner at Mushroom Rock.
On Sunday morning, we again got together in the classroom for a lecture by Andre on catchments and rivers and the South African Scoring System (SASS) and Mini SASS. We were off to the river again, where each group was required to conduct their own mini-SASS.
We were tasked with collecting different species of freshwater macro-invertebrates, identifying them using loupes and calculating a mini-SASS score. We now understand the relationship between the SASS/Mini SASS, the complexity of conservation, and how one would gather data to protect wetlands.
After this fascinating exercise, we returned to camp to write an open-book test on what we had learned over the weekend.
Although the winds were high, we wrote our exams in a beautiful outdoor setting.
Thank you, Peter, André and Britta, for a very enjoyable and interesting weekend.
ED’s NOTE: Thanks Karin, for providing this feedback on what was obviously a weekend packed with new experiences.