The South African National Ecosystem Classification System
A unifying classification and mapping approach for ecosystem types across the country's land and seascapes.
The South African National Ecosystem Classification System
A wall to wall map and classification of all ecosystems in South Africa across the land and seascape.
Applications of the SA-NECS
Classification and mapping ecosystem types underpin a variety of applications relating to managing natural resources, spatial biodiversity planning, land-use planning and marine spatial planning, allocating environmental flows, ecosystems accounting, environmental assessment and monitoring in all realms. Ecosystem types are increasingly being used as units of assessment in national and international processes.
A cross-realm approach to mapping
Alignment of realm-specific maps of ecosystem types was essential for developing an integrated national map of ecosystem types. Integration and alignment efforts shown as a schematic illustration (from NBA Synthesis, Skowno et al. 2019); B, illustrating the features used to delineate the seashore zone (backshore and shore), and how the estuarine functional zone also includes estuarine shores (extracted from Harris et al. 2019b)
A South African National Ecosystem Classification System Handbook was created to describe the purpose and approach of the SA-NECS, as well as outline the current classifications and the history and development of these classifications in each realm.
The SA-NECS is a major collaborative effort with dozens of expert contributors from across the country. and abroad, each with their own special experience and knowledge. SANBI and the CSIR play central roles in coordinating and organising the various contributions, and curating the resulting maps and data. There are formal governance structures in place to manage the development of each map of ecosystem types (described in the previous section) but there are also numerous other forums where aspects of the maps and classification systems are shared with broader stakeholder and user groups. These include a range of academic conferences and other communities of practice related to planning and management, such as the annual Biodiversity Planning Forum and Freshwater Ecosystem Network. In this way additional expertise is constantly invited to the process, new data sets are uncovered and important feedback from key user groups is received.
Comparing classification systems between realms within the SA-NECS
The principles and approaches described in Section A ensure that the classification systems of each realm are broadly comparable with one another. Hence important uniting features include:
An identified management and analysis hierarchical level (i.e. the ecosystem type level) that is mapped at roughly similar scales.
Ecologically defined globally comparable upper hierarchical levels that can be used beyond national analyses and reporting. Although the classification system with each realm of the SA-NECS has been developed by different communities of experts in South Africa, these expert communities often overlap, and several committee members of the WECC, NVMC, EECC, and MECC overlap and share similar approaches to classifying and delineating features in the landscape. As a result, differences between realms exist but there are many fundamental unifying characteristics
For example, although each realm has different hierarchical levels (Table 4), each realm has selected a level equivalent to the mesoscale called ecosystem types, which can be used for ecosystem red list assessments (RLAs) and other analyses
The Integrated Map of Ecosystem Types (IMET) knits together the maps of ecosystem types across all four realms such that there is a seamless transition across the marine, estuarine and terrestrial realms. The freshwater map of ecosystem types is currently not integrated into the IMET.
The SA-NECS is intentionally designed to be flexible and adaptable as we uncover new data about our ecosystem types and the need to add new classification levels, or additional ecosystem types becomes neccessary. For example much remains to be understood in the marine and freshwater realms.
In 2022, pelagic ecosystem types were added to the marine map of ecosystem types. The maps are still a seamless transition across the land and seascape, however, benthic ecosystem types off the shelf now have a dual assignment and have both a benthic and pelagic assignment to represent the ecosystem types in both the sea floor and in the water column. The approach was adopted with the understanding that the coupling between the water column and the seafloor is stronger in shallow water, but becomes more distinct from each other as the water column becomes deeper. In this figure you may swipe to the right to view the pelagic ecosystem types.
Current research and future research needs
Although progress has been made in the classification and mapping of ecosystems in all four realms, advances are often made under pressured deadlines linked to the publication of national-level reports such as the NBA. Human and financial resource constraints exist for ecosystem classification and mapping in all realms.
Research is needed to improve the classification systems and maps of each realm, and the integration of the realms, and to provide strategic guidance for the range of organisations and institutions whose work contributes to or could contribute to building these essential foundational datasets. In addition, ongoing engagement with regional and international efforts in this regard is important to align and contextualise the SA-NECS, particularly with the emerging IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology.
