Browsing by Subject "Wetlands"

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    Open Access
    The hydro politics of living with urban wetlands in Zimbabwe: pasts, presents and future
    (2025) Mupani, Helen Tevedzerai; Solomon, Nikiwe
    Urban wetlands are important ecosystems that support both nature and people, but they are under threat from growing cities, climate change, and economic challenges. This thesis looks at how people interact with wetlands, focusing on the power, policies, and everyday actions that shape how wetlands are used, changed, and cared for over time. It examines the case studies of Borrowdale and Mbare in Harare to discover how communities living alongside wetlands, engage with them, the value they attach to these spaces – social, economic, spiritual, and cultural – and how they are impacted by management policies over time. The research highlights how people have become increasingly disconnected from the natural environment, showing how changes over time – from pre-colonial traditions to colonial rule and modern policies – have reshaped the way people view and use wetlands, by extension how policies get imprinted in landscapes, and how they shift relationships over time. Borrowdale and Mbare tell different stories about who controls wetlands, who benefits from them, and who is left out. Drawing on personal experiences and history to the conversation about wetlands, the aim is to show how focusing only on one field, like conservation, economics, or anthropology, limits how we understand and live with wetlands. Instead, it calls for a broader, more connected way of thinking about these important spaces. In doing so we broaden how we manage and live with wetlands through co-generative and response-able approaches for more habitable futures.
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    Open Access
    Wetlands in changed landscapes: the influence of habitat transformation on the physico-chemistry of temporary depression wetlands
    (Public Library of Science, 2014) Bird, Matthew S; Day, Jenny A
    Temporary wetlands dominate the wet season landscape of temperate, semi-arid and arid regions, yet, other than their direct loss to development and agriculture, little information exists on how remaining wetlands have been altered by anthropogenic conversion of surrounding landscapes. This study investigates relationships between the extent and type of habitat transformation around temporary wetlands and their water column physico-chemical characteristics. A set of 90 isolated depression wetlands (seasonally inundated) occurring on coastal plains of the south-western Cape mediterranean-climate region of South Africa was sampled during the winter/spring wet season of 2007. Wetlands were sampled across habitat transformation gradients according to the areal cover of agriculture, urban development and alien invasive vegetation within 100 and 500 m radii of each wetland edge. We hypothesized that the principal drivers of physico-chemical conditions in these wetlands (e.g. soil properties, basin morphology) are altered by habitat transformation. Multivariate multiple regression analyses (distance-based Redundancy Analysis) indicated significant associations between wetland physico-chemistry and habitat transformation (overall transformation within 100 and 500 m, alien vegetation cover within 100 and 500 m, urban cover within 100 m); although for significant regressions the amount of variation explained was very low (range: ∼2 to ∼5.5%), relative to that explained by purely spatio-temporal factors (range: ∼35.5 to ∼43%). The nature of the relationships between each type of transformation in the landscape and individual physico-chemical variables in wetlands were further explored with univariate multiple regressions. Results suggest that conservation of relatively narrow (∼100 m) buffer strips around temporary wetlands is likely to be effective in the maintenance of natural conditions in terms of physico-chemical water quality.