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Kruger National Park

Scientific Services

Key management issues

 

A Framework for Developing and Implementing Management Plans for South African National Parks

Effective custodianship of South Africa’s biodiversity heritage is the primary mandate of South African National Parks (SANParks) and the chief purpose of the protected areas it maintains. The McKinsey report of 2003 highlighted SANParks’ lack of a formal biodiversity policy, and the absence of management plans for most national parks. In addition, it found poor cohesion across parks and directorates and a lack of co-operative governance and public participation policies or processes. The report concluded that there was a need for three operational emphases within SANParks: biodiversity custodianship, tourism development and constituency building.

 

Towards a new elephant management policy for South Africa (1995 – 2008)

When the first National Parks were proclaimed in South Africa early in the 20th century only a handful of elephants remained within the country’s borders, but ever since then our national elephant population has been growing. Today, South Africa is home to 17 840 elephant, making up 3.8 % of Africa’s total population of 490 000. As early as the 1950s, concerns were expressed about the potential impacts of confined elephant populations on their habitats. The first management interventions in South Africa to limit these impacts allowed in 1967, when elephants were culled in the Kruger National Park for the first time. When South Africa was accepted back into the international fold in the mid 1990s, SANParks’ elephant management policies were questioned by international, and then local, animal rights groups.

Elephant policy

The KNP is committed to a mission emphasising biodiversity in the widest sense (i.e. structure, function and composition across scales from genetic to landscape and even subcontinental),and makes specific mention of fluxes as part of this. The theoretical basis of quantifying and managing for biodiversity and flux has its origin in the emergent heterogeneity paradigm (e.g. Christensen 1997; Fiedler et al. 1997), but still has many unknown dimensions in practice. Driving variables in savannas include nutrients, moisture, fire, herbivory and others (e.g. Wiens 1997). Elephant herbivory is considered particularly significant, as in some studies, elephants at high densities have been shown to negatively affect biodiversity (Cumming et al 1997, Western & Gichohi 1989). If there is variation in these driving variables over time and space, an ever-changing mosaic should be the outcome. The patches which result are seen as organised in a hierarchy of scales (Wiens 1997). If, for example, many levels of herbivory are naturally superimposed on a fire mosaic, then at certain scales even more diversity should result.

Click here for Elephant Workshop Proceedings

Fire policy

The proposed fire management system for the Kruger National Park has been developed to satisfy the Park’s recently revised ecosystem objectives, which stress heterogeneity over space and time. The past lightning-driven system meant to achieve this, but proved to be dominated instead by fires caused by illegal immigrants. This led to the revision, which was well underway before the tragic fire of 4 September 2001, an event that served to help unify relationships between this and KNP fire security policies.

Click here for the revised Kruger Fire Management Policy of 2002 and for General Tourist Information updated 2005. You can also view the lastest Fire Mapping Report, the methodology of which is discussed in more detail under Remote Sensing Applications in the KNP.

Water provision

Tuberculosis

Zoning