SAEON Snippets

"We have a choice where the globe will end up in a hundred years." - Guy Midgley, South African National Biodiversity Institute (Picture © NASA) "Land transformation is the single most important driving force in environmental change in this country." - Tim O'Connor, University of Witwatersrand (Picture © Mitzi du Plessis)

Heard at the SAEON Summit ...

- Compiled by Marina Joubert and Mitzi du Plessis

• "Understanding better, for better action!" - Derek Hanekom, SA government
• "It has become suicidal for an individual, an organisation or a country, to resist joint research projects or to restrict access to important datasets and information, as this would have serious negative consequences for its scientific, environmental and economic competitiveness in the global arena." - Derek Hanekom
• "This Summit is also about sharing scarce resources." - Johan Pauw, SAEON
• "Politics play a key role in providing answers to inter-disciplinary approaches." - Khungeka Njobe, CSIR
• "We are still learning about how much communication it takes to keep a network together." - Albert van Jaarsveld, University of Stellenbosch
• "SAEON meets the requirements of a National Research Facility under the NRF." - Albert van Jaarsveld)
• "The problem of working with space agencies is that their budgets make ours look like pocket money. " - Bob Scholes
• "We, like most other nations, face major environmental challenges and unless we have the necessary environmental observations systems that allows us to monitor and fix these, we are in deep trouble." - Bob Scholes
• "Your data does not belong to you. It is suicidal to restrict access to data." - Bob Scholes (students workshop)
• "There are two incredibly uncomfortable words that come to the fore: politics and cities. Two things that scientists don't really like, but can no longer ignore." - Sue Parnell, University of Cape Town
• "Long-term observation science is also big-instrument science. We need big capital equipment, just like the astronomers need new telescopes." - Steven Chown, Director: DST-NRF Centre of Excellence for Invasion Biology, University of Stellenbosch
• "We need an enabling Act to ensure SAEON's permanence." - Terry Newby, Agricultural Research Council
• "Things are getting worse rather than better in most biomes of the world." - Belinda Reyers, CSIR
• "We have to embrace the living landscape and not work only in the well-conserved areas." - Mary Scholes, University of Witwatersrand
• "Everything starts with theory." - Ronel Nel, Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife
• "We need armies of data managers." - Coleen Moloney, University of Cape Town
• "Your data centre will be remembered for its data quality only; do one thing to compromise it and nobody will want to touch it." - Laurie Barwell, CSIR