AfriCat’s Research Focus and Objectives
AfriCat’s primary objective, since its inception, is to contribute to the conservation of Namibia’s wildlife. As the main challenge for wildlife conservation today is habitat loss, and recognizing that the Okonjima Nature Reserve was established specifically to create protected habitat for wildlife, AfriCat’s focus is on conservation research to ensure that the Okonjima Nature Reserve maximizes its contribution to wildlife conservation through three inter-related objectives:
Conducting Research on Protected Areas:
Research within the Reserve focuses on assessing the contribution of enclosed protected areas to wildlife conservation. This includes assessing the sustainability of the ecosystem within the Reserve.
Advancing Conservation Knowledge:
The Reserve provides unique opportunities to answer critical conservation questions that would be difficult to examine in other settings.
Improving Reserve Management:
Research findings are used to refine and enhance the management practices within the Reserve, ensuring its long-term ecological health and effectiveness in conservation.
Research Strategy and Questions
Between the AfriCat team, the Okonjima team and our collaborators an unfeasible number of research questions have been proposed, on many different themes and issues. We have decided however that we want to:
- Maintain a focus on our key objectives; all research questions must contribute to one of the above-mentioned objectives.
- Strengthen synergies between our research questions such that they support and complement each other
build up a comprehensive understanding of the ecology of the ONR. - Take advantage of the unique opportunities offered by the ONR; the opportunity to undertake long-term and on-going monitoring, ease of access which enables fine-scale monitoring, wildlife that is comfortable around humans and so continue to exhibit their natural behaviour in our presence, wildlife that is protected from human threats and the availability of a wealth of historical and current data about the individuals being studied.
- Do less rather than more but do it well.
AfriCat is not a research centre. We do not have the capacity or the resources to host large or even small numbers of students and researchers. We want to maintain a light footprint on the Reserve recognizing that it is already visited twice a day by Okonjima guests. We also want to be as un-invasive as possible on the wildlife in the Reserve while still not missing the opportunity to learn all it can teach us.
Our research strategy is therefore for the small AfriCat team to undertake all basic but on-going data collection. And to complement this through collaborations with external students and researchers, to analyze and interpret the data collected; occasionally complemented by more specialized data collection for finite amounts of time that we can facilitate and support.
AfriCat aims to understand the total ecosystem of the ONR. However, target wildlife species are:
- Predators – as they are the main victims of human-wildlife conflict and so suffer disproportionately from discrimination and habitat loss; in the ONR these are leopards and brown hyena.
- Endangered species – for which conservation strategies are most urgently needed; the ground pangolin (Smutsia temminckii) is classified as “vulnerable” and is naturally occurring in the ONR.
In time, if resources and time allow, we may potentially expand research to other endangered and little known species that occur within the Reserve, such as aardvark, aardwolf, bat-eared fox, serval, caracal, African wildcat and honey badger.
