On behalf of SAIAB’s Margaret Smith Library, Sally Schramm, Senior Librarian attended the Biodiveristy Heritage Library (BHL) - Africa Launch hosted by the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) at the Pretoria National Botanical Gardens in Pretoria. BHL is a consortium of major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions. For more information visit the BHL site:
http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2013/04/making-bhl-africa-reality-bhl-africa.html
Dr John Sullivan, uses the Biodiversity Heritage Library in his work on phylogenetic interrelationships and evolution of freshwater fishes in Africa. To read more follow this link:
http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2011/09/bhl-and-our-users-eol-rubenstein-fellow.html
Use the Intranet tab on the SAIAB website for easy access to on-line resources
As SAIAB starts using more and more on-line resources (e.g. venue and vehicle bookings), keeping track of the addresses for all these resources has become more difficult.
To make this easier, we’ve added a tab called ‘Intranet’ to the SAIAB website. Links to SAIAB resources as well as useful NRF sites such as ‘HR Online’ can be accessed through this.
Darragh Woodford, a Postdoctoral Fellow at SAIAB, was awarded the EIFAAC (European Inland Fisheries and Aquaculture Advisory Commision) award for best poster at a conference on Freshwater Invasives - Networking for Strategy (FINS) in Galway, Ireland.
Woodford’s poster described a study that he has been conducting on an irrigation network in the Sunday’s River catchment; “I used this artificial ecosystem as a natural experiment to understand how factors like the number of invading fish entering a river network over time, the local habitat conditions and the breeding adaptations of each fish species interact to enable the success and speed of invasion,” He explained. Woodford’s poster also pointed out that inter-basin water transfer schemes, which provide a constant source of new introductions, represent a serious threat to securing river systems against new invasions, both in South Africa and around the world. Woodford provided input for a SAIAB Research Nugget, entitled, Sunday’s River Invasions Project; find the Research Nugget http://www.saiab.ac.za/features/sundays-river-fish-invasions-project.htm
Woodford says he sees this award as a validation of the quality of research he has been able to produce through his collaborations at SAIAB and the Centre for Invasion Biology (CIB) at Stellenbosch University. “Given that this was a conference organised by and for European fisheries agencies, universities and government bodies, the award is testament to the fact that the research we do here at SAIAB is relevant, not only to South Africa but also to Europe and indeed many places around the world,” he said.
