Magister Scientiae (Biodiversity and Conservation Biology) - MSc (Biodiv and Cons Biol) / Freshwater ecosystems are valuable to all components of biodiversity communities. Globally, these
ecosystems are threatened by human activity and as a consequence, many vertebrates, including
waterbirds, have become threatened. Wetlands are one of the most productive ecosystem types in
the world. Yet, despite this, many protected area networks around the world fail to include this
ecosystem type in their protected area networks. On a national scale, in South Africa, wetland loss
and deteriorating wetland habitat quality continues to restrict and reduce the range of wetland
waterbirds. For this thesis, Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) species distribution modelling was used to
identify additional areas of possible waterbird occurrence. The MaxEnt results noted that waterbirds
rely on a combination of these environmental variables for their distribution ecology in their wetland
habitat, with vegetation and humidity variables having the highest predictive powers. These would
be considered important predictor variables for the distribution ecology of these waterbirds.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uwc/oai:etd.uwc.ac.za:11394/8000 |
| Date | January 2020 |
| Creators | Daniels, Neil |
| Contributors | Knight, Richard, Desmet, Phillip |
| Publisher | University of Western Cape |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | University of Western Cape |
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