Understanding ecological and management recovery pathways after Invasive Alien Plant clearing in the Kruger to Canyons Biosphere Region, South Africa

Background and Rationale: Invasive alien plants (IAPs) continue to threaten biodiversity, water availability, and ecological functioning across southern Africa. Large-scale clearing initiatives have aimed to reverse these impacts. However, post-clearing recovery outcomes remain inconsistent and poorly understood, particularly across varied land tenure systems and management contexts.
Within the Kruger to Canyons Biosphere Region (K2C), South Africa, extensive clearing is underway in three major catchments: the Upper Groot Letaba, Upper Blyde, and Lower Blyde. Each catchment provides a unique socio-ecological setting:
• Upper Groot Letaba is largely under private ownership, with intensive agricultural and forestry land use, habitat fragmentation, and overgrowth from both alien and indigenous encroachment.
• Upper Blyde is predominantly state-managed (under Mpumalanga Parks and Tourism) and includes areas of communal land and community property associations (CPAs), with management challenges linked to poaching, unplanned fires, and governance conflicts. Private and state-owned forestry land is also present where fire and management of alien plants in conservation corridors with sedimentation and run-off a challenge. Illegal mining is also prevalent.
• Lower Blyde comprises a mosaic of tribal authority land, CPAs, and protected areas, facing threats from illegal mining, sand extraction, and sedimentation of rivers and dams.
These diverse systems offer an opportunity to compare ecological recovery patterns and management effectiveness across different land-use, governance, and environmental conditions.

This project aims to explore how ecological and institutional recovery unfolds after IAP clearing, and how the most effective management approaches might be scaled across the K2C landscape to promote long-term restoration success and water security. This is critical in the context of the work undertaken in the K2C Biosphere Region, as it will generate critical evidence on restoration trajectories and the feasibility and value proposition of sustained catchment-scale restoration investments.