Posted on by Loosely Translated

The year is 1 BD, it has to be

As this year comes rushing to a close, there are a lot of stressed-out postgraduate students trying to squeeze every last little bit out of 2018 so that they might get their work done to try and hand in their thesis now or early next year. I am one such postgraduate. I am counting down the days!

Counting is something humans do to keep order and monitor progress. The B.C./A.D. system is a good example and is based on the traditional reckoning of the year Jesus was born. Since 1988, it has been adopted as an ISO 8601 standard, allowing all of us to keep record the past, present and future.

Marking calendars for special occasions is one thing, but creating your own designation for something really special is next level. Therefore, in my life, I have decided that 2019 will be 1 A.D., or After Doctorate, which would make 2018, 1 B.D.  Note: There is no 0 B.C. or 0 A.D because Roman numerals, which was commonly used at the time, did not have a zero number.

There is some method in my madness. This designation, like the B.C./A.D. system, marks a significant moment in my life. Life after getting my doctorate, I feel, is going to change completely. I’m told that having a PhD opens more exciting doors, even though those recent graduates are doing postdoctoral fellowships that don’t seem too different to what they were doing before. Granted, there are more freedoms in a postdoc… and the title is a hard-earned badge of honour.

From 27 B.D. till now, I have felt a little lost navigating a path that has been remarkably different to the ones my childhood friends ventured down. Many of them went to school, then University or College for three to four years, got a job afterwards and started their families. Since I was six years old, I have been on a journey that is based, almost entirely, at institutions of learning.

They say Life is the greatest teacher of all but if you have been at school for most of your life, the greatest teachers are… teachers and lecturers. They taught me where to find my compass, how to use it, and when to follow it. There is no doubt that after my PhD I’m going to learn a lot about life in the ‘real’ world but I think studying has allowed me to wade in already.

As I prepare to cross the B.D./A.D. line, to submerse myself in the world post PhD, I can’t help but feel a little nervous. I have made a commitment to finish in the next few months. I can’t make this statement and not hit my deadline. My friends and family are as excited as I am, I can’t let us all down.

A big part of my life is coming to an end. It feels like the end of a long pilgrimage but I know that it is just the beginning. With the PhD at my side, who knows what the future holds. I hope it is great. After all this, it is the start of a new era.

 

 

 

 

Posted on by Loosely Translated

Blue skies and burnt trees

The Cape is a special place to do just about anything; surfing, whale watching, brewing, foresting and field tripping. On the 19th of August, I set off on a 3800 km journey to and around the Southern and Eastern Cape with one of FABI’s extension officers, Sandisiwe Jali, and two graduate students, Bianca Jardim and Sydney Sithole. The purpose of this field trip was to collect insect specimens and investigate various pest and disease issues in commercial forestry plantations. It isn’t often that the Tree Protection Co-operative Programme (TPCP) finds itself in the Cape, when compared to the much closer Limpopo, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal provinces, which made this trip quite distinctive.

Field trips around South Africa are always memorable; you get to see more of this beautiful country, you get to interact more closely with other students, meet the people in the forestry industry, and put your finger on the pulse of plant health in SA. Our first stop was to Stellenbosch, wine country, to meet Deon Malherbe, a researcher at Stellenbosch University. Deon is monitoring a Eucalyptus (gum) trial, which was setup by Camcore–an international tree breeding organization–to look at the performance of various hybrids across different sites. This valuable trial is under attack by a number of Eucalyptus pests, which we helped Deon identify. Together, we worked out a scoring system for better assessing the damage caused by these insects.

From there, we set off east to Riversdale, about 50 km north of Still Bay, to collect a few pine logs containing the larvae of a woodwasp, Sirex noctilio. The larvae and adults of this wasp will be examined at FABI for the presence of a tiny worm, Deladenus siricidicola—a bio-control agent developed at FABI that has saved the South African forestry industry more than 400 million rand. Here we paused to take in some of the sights while we thought about what R400 million could buy you.

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The next day, we continued east–towards Knysna–to meet Awelani Netshituka, a forester working for PG Bison at the Ruigtevlei office. Many parts of the Cape have been, and still are, at the mercy of a severe drought—the worst in 100 years. We were often reminded about using water sparingly by the little notes stuck on the walls near the taps and toilets of our accommodation. While the drought meant one couldn’t take long showers anymore, it also meant that much of the vegetation hadn’t had a good shower either. The dry conditions, high winds speeds and building fuel load led to the fires that swept through Knysna and the surrounding areas, claiming seven lives.

Awelani showed us some of the areas that had been devastated by the fires and the recovery operations under way to try and salvage some of the burnt timber. In the valley below the Ruigtevlei office, in front of thousands of dead trees, there are long lines of what looked like neatly stacked mounds of charcoal. When we asked what those lines were, we were told that they were the burnt logs they had harvested after the fire. They have harvested so much, the market is flooded. Now they have to try and store it! The arrangement of theses logs under sprinklers are called wet decks, which helps keep the wood moist until they can be used.

While many trees were harvested, the lesser-affected younger stands were left to recover. Awelani took us to some of these compartments. The prolonged drought has had a significant impact on these trees. They are trying to recover but without good rains they are being attacked by a number of different secondary or opportunistic pests and fungi, killing those too weak to put up a fight. And this wasn’t isolated to a single company or region. We saw more examples of this at a number of sites we visited.

For any industry growing plants and selling their products, climate is going to be a more important part of planning; for South Africa, a water scarce country, even more so. We are going to have to be smart with how we collect, store and recycle our water. For our plants, we are going to have to develop more efficient breeding strategies, develop and implement possible GMOs, and we are going to need more scientists to understand the effects of climate on pests and diseases because we are going to have many more blue sky days (no rain) and more burnt trees (any crop plant, really) if we don’t.