Biological connections
Mary Scholes has spent her long career trying to see the bigger picture.
Not just understanding plants and the nutrients they need to flourish, but the soil that provides those nutrients, the atmospheric gases the plants absorb and release, and the forces that threaten their survival, such as wildfires or drought. The term for this discipline is ‘systems analysis’ and that’s how Mary describes her work – but she never loses sight of the human element. Her mission? To teach the next generation of experts and knit them into a powerful network dedicated to ensuring agriculture and forestry can be more resilient to climate change.
It's a more revolutionary idea than you might think. Mary, who has been a Professor in the School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa since 2002 (and working with the University since 1987), says academic departments typically all adhered to old models of the pure sciences: biology, physics and chemistry. No one was looking across traditional subject barriers to explore the synergies across the disciplines.
That’s something she wanted to change. And a moment of serendipity led to her being able to do just that.
One day in 1995,former Sappi Chairman Eugene van As walked into the university (which was down the road from his office), and asked, “Do you have anybody here that works on plants?” Mary was quickly summoned to speak to him. “At the end of our conversation he asked me to write a one page project outline on what I could do for the forestry industry. So I did. He said Sappi would sponsor my position as a research chair for a 10-year period (1996-2006), on the proviso that all the research I did on forestry species and the functioning of plantations was available to whoever was interested”
Mary knew immediately that she wanted to use the money for more than just her own research. “There weren’t enough people to do the work that was needed on climate change,” she says. “Whatever students I trained, I wanted those people to benefit the country”. So she proposed to the university that they put the Sappi money into an endowment that could be used for research, student bursaries and field trips. After that first 10 years the funding didn’t stop – and it continues to this day. The groundbreaking work it supported has now reached critical mass: in the last decade, a robust community of young research scientists working in the forestry sector has emerged, allowing researchers to cooperate across their inter-related areas of expertise – making a significant difference.
I am now working with current postgraduates and colleagues who I trained 20 years ago, and have stayed in the forestry sector and in many cases are now influential in their own right.
Mary Scholes, Professor in the School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa
Mary’s participation, in 2000, in a huge international effort looking at burning in the savannas of southern Africa, including Zambia and Angola demonstrated the true power of collaboration. “It was the first time, since the ending of apartheid, that we had 50 to 100 international scientists working in the field together, measuring the changes in atmospheric chemistry, especially the carbon and nitrogen compounds, that impacted the lower troposphere. Fires burn regularly in South America and in Southern Africa, and this was the definitive experiment to measure the relative impacts.
This issue has become, quite literally, a burning question. As temperatures rise, the vegetation gets drier and the risk of wildfires soars. Mary and her colleagues probe the impact of more frequent and intense blazes and consider how to mitigate against them. “What we look at is the potential severity of the fires. Are they getting hotter? If the fire is more intense, does it burn a larger area, and become harder to contain? The only way you can manage the fire is essentially to keep it out by creating fire breaks. But what should those fire breaks look like, and how do you maintain them? It’s not only the climatic modelling that’s important, which is high-tech stuff; you also have to transfer that into a knowledge base that the forester on the ground can use every day to keep fires out of the plantation.”
These extreme conditions are rewriting the rules of forestry, and Mary and her colleagues are developing climate models to give the industry a tool for forecasting the best areas for planting in the next 25 years. “The forestry sector are efficient in land preparation and in the planting and caring for young seedlings” says Mary. “I can’t improve on that, but what I can improve is to understand how different genotypes will be more resilient to climate change and to an increase in the severity of the impacts from pests and pathogens.” Her research group, in collaboration with other scientists across the country, use a wide range of instruments to take measurements at the leaf level and then scale those measurements to whole trees, compartments and landscapes.
Over the past three decades, Mary has chaired various scientific advisory bodies ranging from soil fertility to atmospheric chemistry. This has enabled her to travel the world and share the knowledge and skills learned, especially in identifying new scientific directions which would benefit the wider economy. “The Sappi funding serves as the central core and, together with additional funding from Forestry South Africa, enables us to work with top researchers at other institutions and across disciplines from genetics to plant physiology, mathematics, climate modelling, engineers and wood product specialists, extending the value chain. I am now working with current postgraduates and colleagues who I trained 20 years ago, and have stayed in the forestry sector and in many cases are now influential in their own right.”
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