The Eastern Cape province is situated at the interface of seven of South Africa’s nine biomes, and includes parts of three global biodiversity hotspots. This means that any particular municipal area is likely to include a wide variety of habitats and important biodiversity that can be confusing for planners. For this reason, and because many ecological processes operate at a large spatial scale, it was important to develop a provincial biodiversity plan that provided a consistent treatment of the whole province, and that identifi ed a system of ecological corridors that crossed both biome and administrative boundaries.
This provincial biodiversity plan can be used for:
• identifying sites for consolidation and expansion of the provincial protected area network • fl agging areas of biodiversity importance for conservation action outside of protected areas • indicating areas where fi ner-scale planning is necessary at the district or local level
• informing province-wide spatial planning and social and economic development planning in all sectors.
The plan is not useful for operational decision-making at the site level, as the spatial scale is too coarse. This is the role of district or local biodiversity sector plans.
Figure 3.7 Eastern Cape Biodiversity Plan showing ecological corridors
Coastal landscape with grassland-forest mosaics, Wild Coast, Eastern Cape
Features of the Eastern Cape provincial biodiversity plan
• It identifi es a network of province-wide critical biodiver- sity areas located in ecological corridors.
• It provides user-friendly land-use guidelines that can be applied consistently in critical biodiversity areas.
• It used methodology that effectively accommodated both data-rich and data-poor parts of the province.
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Chapter 3If provincial biodiversity plans have been produced at a fi ne scale, they can be directly cut to district municipal boundaries, creating new sets of fi ne-scale district plans. If the provincial biodiversity plans are at a coarser scale, they can inform the develop- ment of district municipal plans at a suitable scale (1:50 000 or fi ner). When accompanied by district- specifi c land-use guidelines and contextual information, these district municipal plans can be used to inform spatial development frameworks, environmental impact assessments and land-use management decisions. Fine-scale biodiversity sector plans have been produced for a number of districts in South Africa. These biodiver- sity sector plans represent the biodiversity sector’s input into a wide range of planning processes, frameworks and assessments that are used by land-use planners and decision-makers in many other sectors, as illustrated in Figure 3.8 below.
As explained in Chapter 2, the kinds of spatial data needed to develop a systematic biodiversity plan include both biodiversity pattern data (including vegetation or habitat types, river ecosystem types, location of wetlands, distributions of species of special concern) and ecological process data (such as corridors along upland-lowland gradients, soil formation or water production areas, and bird nesting sites).
Availability of spatial biodiversity data varies consider- ably across South Africa. Some parts of the country have relatively comprehensive data sets on ecosystem types and species distributions (such as in the fynbos areas of the Western Cape and in KwaZulu-Natal), and others have only basic ecosystem data and little species- level information. “Rich” data sets would be those that include a large number of observational data points based on specialist fi eld studies of ecosystems or species distributions, or where fi ne-scale mapping of vegetation
Figure 3.8 How biodiversity sector plans feed into multi-sectoral planning processes
Systematic biodiversity plan
District-level map(s) of CBAs and ESAs
Provincial maps of CBAs and ESAs
Biodiversity sector plan(s) provide the biodiversity
sector’s input into
Spatial development and land-use planning Environmental assessment Social and economic development planning Environmental management tools Other planning processes Regional District boundaries
Add district-specifi c biodiversity information and land-use guidelines to maps
types has been carried out and data is available in ideal formats (see info box). In “data-poor” situations there are few direct measurements or fi eld observa- tions of biodiversity and landscape features. In these cases, planners use data gathered through national- scale assessments, or they rely on remote sensing or on generic GIS-modelling of biodiversity and landscape features. In all cases, expert knowledge can also be used to augment whatever spatial data is available. It is possible to produce a robust systematic biodiversity plan in these varying data contexts, although care needs to be exercised regarding the scale at which the map is applied to land-use planning and decision-making on the ground. An example from South Africa of a system- atic biodiversity plan produced despite the limitations of a data-poor context is the systematic biodiversity plan for the Central Karoo District (see case study on page 56).
The resources required and time it takes to develop a systematic biodiversity plan can vary quite widely depending on a number of factors. These include: how much data is available at the start of the planning process; whether it is necessary to commission expert studies to gather additional data on specifi c features such as wetlands or estuaries; the extent of stakehold- er involvement in the planning process; availability of appropriate expertise; and the number of planners and other experts involved in the planning process. In South Africa, the systematic biodiversity plan for the Central Karoo district, which is relatively data-poor (see case study), was completed by two planners at a cost of under R500,000 (US$65,000), within an eight-month period. In the more data-rich Western Cape, where specialist studies were commissioned and experts were involved in the planning process, district-level biodiver- sity plans have taken about 20 months to prepare, at a cost of R1,2 million (US$162,000) per plan.
Baviaanskloof landscape, Eastern Cape