SAEON

SAEON: A DEVELOPING FACILITY OF THE NRF FUNDED BY DST

SAEON is a research facility that establishes and maintains nodes (environmental observatories, field stations or sites) linked by an information management network to serve as research and education platforms for long-term studies of ecosystems that will provide for incremental advances in our understanding of ecosystems and our ability to detect, predict and react to environmental change. The core research programme will strive to distinguish between anthropogenic and natural change as well as to unravel the relations between social change and ecosystem change. One of the primary features of the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) approach is that it overcomes the deficiencies associated with postgraduate research projects. Typically those cannot interpret the ever-present temporal and spatial environmental variability because of the pressure to produce a thesis within two to three years. SAEON will bring better cohesion between research programmes nationally and internationally and will ensure that LTER data is archived and accessible as a national asset for generations to come.

WHO SHOULD READ FURTHER?

• Scientists and students/learners interested in long-term studies of the earth systems and biodiversity
• Research managers
• Environmental educators
• Companies impacting on the goods and services provided by the environment
• Politicians, policy makers and environmental managers requiring environmental information
• Members of the public whose livelihoods are vulnerable to environmental change
• Funding agencies interested in developing capacity and promoting knowledge of life-support systems and how they are changing

KEYWORDS for SAEON

Climate change, global change, environmental change, research, environmental education, rural sociology, environmental information systems, biodiversity, earth systems, ecosystems, social systems, livelihoods, agriculture, monitoring, long-term data series, oceanography, atmospheric sciences, rivers, hydrology, remote sensing, nutrient loading, land-use, ecology, primary production, floods, droughts, public health, industry, economics, human geography, geochemistry, groundwater, vulnerability, fisheries, network, National System of Innovation, societal change, experimentation, multi-disciplinary, research platform, spatial variation, landscape, disturbance regimes, event-driven, site-based, freshwater, soils, sediments, ocean, coast, mountains.