The dissertation's point of departure and contention is that the Admiralty Reserve is one of the Coastal Resources facing degradation due to the fact that it is a common property owned by the State President on behalf of all citizens of South Africa. The environmental management function has become the unfunded mandate of local authorities therefore the administration, control and management of the Admiralty Reserve is the responsibility of local government in terms of various lease agreements. There are currently no specific tools available to local government to manage the Admiralty Reserve. The encroachment of the Admiralty Reserve has been and still is a problem for all coastal municipalities including Umdoni municipality. The rationale for the topic was to study the geography of the Admiralty Reserve, the causes of encroachments and the way in which the local authorities dealt (past and present) with the Admiralty Reserve encroachments; to assess the strategies employed by the municipalities in dealing with encroachments, and with the traditional and evolving functions of the Admiralty Reserve. This was done using standard research methods and techniques. The study is located in one of the small coastal municipalities of South Africa called Umdoni, in the Province of Kwazulu-Natal. The results of the study show that the past and present strategies of dealing with encroachments were adversarial in stance and not collaborative. The failure to administer and manage efficiently can be attributed to the following reasons: lack of capacity to deal with environmental matters and legislation, lack of political willpower, negligence on the part of both national and local government spheres, lack of stewardship, lack of proper education, training and knowledge of environmental issues and negative attitudes towards environmental matters. It was also revealed that generally people encroach into the Reserve because of greed and selfishness. One of the conclusions drawn from the findings was that the Admiralty Reserve has become a victim of fragmented control and management by various spheres of government. The Admiralty Reserve requires an integrated management approach that incorporates civic organizations, the relevant government departments, the local authority and the interested and affected individuals. Local authorities are not given proper tools to manage the Admiralty Reserve. There are many laws but none of them are relevant to the Admiralty Reserve. In the absence of usable legislative tools relevant to the Admiralty Reserve encroachments, it is highly recommended and imperative that coastal local authorities (particularly Umdoni Municipality) should formulate and strengthen their bylaws. / Thesis (M.Soc.Sc)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2005.

Land degradation in communal rangelands is one of the problems that lowers land / Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2009.

The degradation of rangeland grass is currently one of the most serious environmental problems in South Africa. Increaser and decreaser grass species have been used as indicators to evaluate rangeland condition. Therefore, classifying these species and monitoring their relative abundance is an important step for sustainable rangelands management. Traditional methods (e.g. wheel point technique) have been used in classifying increaser and decreaser species over small geographic areas. These methods are regarded as being costly and time-consuming, because grasslands usually cover large expanses that are situated in isolated and inaccessible areas. In this regard, remote sensing techniques offer a practical and economical means for quantifying rangeland degradation over large areas. Remote sensing is capable of providing rapid, relatively inexpensive, and near-real-time data that could be used for classifying and monitoring species. This study advocates the development of techniques based on remote sensing to classify four dominant increaser species associated with rangeland degradation namely: Hyparrhenia hirta, Eragrostis curvula, Sporobolus africanus and Aristida diffusa in Okhombe communal rangeland, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. To our knowledge, no attempt has yet been made to discriminate and characterize the landscape using these species as indicators of the different levels of rangeland degradation using remote sensing. The first part of the thesis reviewed the problem of rangeland degradation in South Africa, the use of remote sensing (multispectral and hyperspectral) and their challenges and opportunities in mapping rangeland degradation using different indicators. The concept of decreaser and increaser species and how it can be used to map rangeland degradation was discussed. The second part of this study focused on exploring the relationship between vegetation species (increaser and decreaser species) and different levels of rangeland degradation. Results showed that, there is significant relationship between the abundance and distribution of different vegetation species and rangeland condition. The third part of the study aimed to investigate the potential use of hyperspectral remote sensing in discriminating between four increaser species using the raw field spectroscopy data and discriminant analysis as a classifier. The results indicate that the spectroscopic approach used in this study has a strong potential to discriminate among increaser species. These positive results prompted the need to scale up the method to airborne remote sensing data characteristics for the purpose of possible mapping of rangeland species as indicators of degradation. We investigated whether canopy reflectance spectra resampled to AISA Eagle resolution and random forest as a classification algorithm could discriminate between four increaser species. Results showed that hyperspectral data assessed with the random forest algorithm has the potential to accurately discriminate species with best overall accuracy. Knowledge on reduced key wavelength regions and spectral band combinations for successful discrimination of increaser species was obtained. These wavelengths were evaluated using the new WorldView imagery containing unique and strategically positioned band settings. The study demonstrated the potential of WorldView-2 bands in classifying grass at species level with an overall accuracy of 82% which is only 5% less than an overall accuracy achieved by AISA Eagle hyperspectral data. Overall, the study has demonstrated the potential of remote sensing techniques to classify different increaser species representing levels of rangeland degradation. In this regard, we expect that the results of this study can be used to support up-to-date monitoring system for sustainable rangeland management. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2011.