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World-class environmental research platforms for a sustainable society

SAEON

South African Environmental Observation Network (SAEON) is a long-term environmental observation and research facility of the National Research Foundation (NRF). SAEON’s three focus areas are environmental observation, data management and education outreach. The Department of Science and Innovation provides core funding for these activities. 

SAEON has a distributed network of seven nodes, two research infrastructures and a national office. The research network covers the major terrestrial and marine ecosystems in South  Africa and supports well over 100 researchers and students a year.

Reflecting on 21 years of NRF-SAEON

Latest Seminar

Title: Integrating Biodiversity Science with Remote Sensing: The Biodiversity Survey of the Cape (BioSCape)

Presenter: Dr Anabelle Cardoso (University at Buffalo & University of Cape Town)

This seminar will give an overview of the BioSCape project, including an introduction to its expected datasets. BioSCape is NASA’s first biodiversity-focused integrated airborne field campaign. It took place in South Africa in Oct-Nov 2023 and investigates the structure, function, and composition of ecosystems, and how and why they are changing in time and space. BioSCape’s airborne dataset is unprecedented in its instrument combination and level of detail, with near complete coverage of the electromagnetic spectrum at high resolution and coincident full-waveform lidar acquisitions. BioSCape’s field datasets quantify the diversity of plant communities including alien invasives and kelp, phytoplankton functional types, phylogenetic histories, eDNA in watersheds, bird and frog acoustics, plant functional and spectral traits, blue carbon, and in-water radiometry. BioSCape is committed to facilitating Open Science and all datasets will be delivered to one of NASA’s Distributed Archive and Analysis Centers.

Latest Training Workshop

GIS for Educators and Learners: free online learning programme aligned to the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statements.

Presenters: Kogie Govender, Caitlin Ransom, Keneilwe Hlahane, and Rion Lerm

Our Research Nodes

SAEON encompasses seven Research Nodes throughout South Africa and a National Office that is located in the country’s political capital of Pretoria. 

Research Infrastructures​

SAEON manages three research infrastructures developed by the Department of Science and Innovation as part of the South African Research Infrastructure Roadmap (SARIR).

EFTEON aims to provide and operate a network of instrumented landscape-level platforms for the South African environmental research community, focused on socially relevant terrestrial landscapes and their coupled hydrological systems. 

The SMCRI provides an array of instruments and physical research platforms around the coast of South Africa and its sub-antarctic islands to collect long-term reliable data for scientific research to help decision makers formulate appropriate environmental policies to lessen the risk and vulnerability of the coastal zone to climate and global change.

The SAPRI is designed as a consortium hosted at the South African Environmental Observation Network (SAEON). The ultimate objective of SAPRI is to enable balanced research growth across the polar disciplines, and to maintain and further expand the world-class long-term observational datasets already established.

SAEON facilitates and conducts research through platforms and these have grown into a diverse array of sites, instruments, infrastructure, datasets, models and staff, widely distributed across both marine and terrestrial environments. 

uLwazi

The SAEON Data Portal is getting better and better!

The current release of the SAEON Data Portal allows for searching SAEON’s data, generating citations in any conceivable format, visualising GIS data on a map, and of course, downloading datasets for further analysis. At its core, the SAEON Data Portal is a search engine.

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