September is Biodiversity month all around the world. It is a time to focus on biodiversity, see how we can celebrate it and support more biodiversity in our surroundings. Planting a greater diversity of native plants, embracing insects in your garden with a bug hotel, and creating a home for a diverse range of birds and little critters, are all ways in which you can celebrate biodiversity this month.
What is Biodiversity?
Biodiversity is intricate network of life, that supports all life. It refers to all the different kinds of life, everything from animals and insects to plants and fungi. These living things are linked together in ecosystems like a web, each one playing its part in supporting everything we require to live: clean water, air, food, medicine and shelter.
What Makes Our Area so Special?
The Gouritz Cluster Biosphere Reserve (Gouritz Region) is special for many reasons, but perhaps the part that sets this region apart from anywhere else in the world is the fact that it is the only area where three biodiversity hotspots meet (The Cape Floristic Region, Succulent Karoo, and Maputaland-Pondoland-Albany Thickets).
Due to these biodiversity hotspots, the Gouritz Region boasts over 5,000 indigenous plant species, over 670 of which are endemic to the region and over 2 950 indigenous animal species including iconic vulnerable species like the Cape Mountain Zebra, Leopard, Blue Crane, and the critically endangered Black Rhino and Riverine Rabbit.
What is threatening our Biodiversity?
Biodiversity around the world has 3 predominant threats – alien invasive plant species, overexploitation of species, and loss of land and habitat. Alien invasive plant species pose a threat for various reasons depending on where in the world you are. In our region alien invasive species are known for using an excess of water, drying up our riverbeds, suppressing our natural vegetation and making the ground under them uninhabitable for our indigenous plants. In our region there are a number of alien invasive plant species that are a direct threat to our biodiversity, including, but not limited to, black wattle, lantana, Australian myrtle, rooikrans, prickly pear, and portjackson.
Overexploitation of species refers to using and taking species faster than they can recover. This includes unsustainable harvesting, overfishing, illegal pouching, and illegal hunting.
Loss of land and habitat happens for many reasons, but largely it is due to urban and agricultural expansion resulting in fragmentation of natural areas.
How Can Households Support Biodiversity?
Perhaps one of the easiest ways to help promote biodiversity is by starting at home. Planting a wider range of native and pollinator friendly plants in your garden is ideal. Starting with a wide range of plants you see in nature around you, such as Fynbos species along the coast to the mountains and, in the Klein Karoo, succulents and karoo shrubs, you would already be encouraging our natural biodiversity.
To support our pollinators, it is important to not only think of bees but also moths and butterflies. According to various studies, there are different colours that will attract different pollinators. Bees favour blue, purple, and yellow flowers, butterflies prefer red and orange, and moths are drawn to white or pale flowers that tend to be more fragrant at night. These are of course not the only pollinators in the region, but by incorporating these colours along with native plants, you can attract a wide array of pollinators to your garden, from bees to sugarbirds.
Another important step you can take towards preserving biodiversity in an easy way is to ensure that you do not plant species that are known to take over or overconsume water. This could be as simple as removing alien and invasive plants if they pop up in your garden, and ensuring that you are knowledgeable about what indigenous plants thrive in your local area.
If you are looking for a fun way to encourage your children to get involved in celebrating biodiversity, then we recommend making bug hotels to place in your garden. Bug hotels are an excellent way to provide safe spaces for insects in your garden, and in turn encouraging biodiversity. You can easily learn how to create your own bug hotel here.
Join Your Community Projects
Around the Gouritz Region there are several ways you can get involved to help promote Biodiversity. There are many conservancies that always need people to help with volunteer work, both financially and physically. Conservancies all take on different projects in their communities, e.g. maintaining local trails, clearing invasive alien plants, creating community gardens, advocating for greenbelts, and arranging cleanups.
If your area does not have a conservancy then you can join other community groups that advocate for our environment. Most towns have groups that work towards keeping their town clean, this is a key part to protecting our biodiversity.
If you find there is an environmentally focused volunteer project that you want to do in your area, you can also get together a group of volunteers to pursue the project. The Friends of the Biosphere programme was developed specifically to support these types of efforts from a financial perspective. If you have a project you want to pursue but need some additional support, then you can learn about our small grant system and apply for a small grant (between R1000 and R3000).
Final Take Aways
September’s Biodiversity Month is a lovely reminder that the extraordinary life around us is worth celebrating and protecting. The Gouritz Region we are lucky, our landscape is rich and unique but it’s also fragile. Small, thoughtful actions by households, businesses and community groups add up to big wins to build resilience for our biodiversity, our life.