Jonkershoek archives enter the digital age

By Michelle Malan, DST/NRF Intern, SAEON Fynbos Node

Collecting historical data for global change research

One of the main aims of SAEON is to deliver long-term data for scientific research. Datasets that span long time frames are particularly important when it comes to climate or global change research, but it is often not practical to set up a project and only expect to get significant results a few decades later.

This is where the preservation of old datasets, such as those from the archives of the Jonkershoek Research Facility (part of the former South African Forestry Research Institute), become important.

The Jonkershoek archives contain photographs, maps and data from an array of projects concerning conservation of the fynbos biome. Above is an example of documents from surveys of rare plant species.

The Jonkershoek Forestry Research Institute was established in 1935 at Jonkershoek, near Stellenbosch, under the directorship of Dr C. L. Wicht. The initial aim was to determine how forestry activities in state plantations would affect climate, water conservation and erosion, and was later expanded to include studies of fynbos ecology, fire and alien species.

Studies from the 1930s to the early 1990s saw the accumulation of a large amount of data dealing with fire experiments, detailed vegetation plot surveys, rare plant surveys and ecological studies, hydrological studies and the development of management plans for catchments around the Western Cape. These data include the longest continuous records for stream flow in the Southern hemisphere.

Stored on paper in a filing cabinet in the safe at the CSIR in Stellenbosch, these data have been relatively well preserved, but have been difficult to access or unavailable to the broader scientific community. The SAEON Fynbos Node has undertaken to collect, scan and archive these documents, with the aim of making the reports and data available to researchers.

Gems from the Jonkershoek archives

As a fledgling scientist, brought up in an age of laptops, digital cameras and the convenience of Excel spreadsheets, trawling through the roughly 13 560 pages of scanned documents has been a humbling experience. Hundreds of pages of handwritten reports have made me realise I should be incredibly grateful for the invention of digital word processors - as I’m sure my predecessors were grateful for the invention of the typewriter and photocopier!

Equipment list from the 1970s. Basic botanical fieldwork requirements have not changed in 40 years, with the exception of digital cameras instead of film, and the addition of the GPS, making our lives much easier!

The archive also contains more than 3 000 photographic prints, which fill a mini filing cabinet of their own. Scanned at highest quality, these photographs (weighing several kilos and involving a complex filing system) can now be fitted into three CDs (taking up less than 1 GB of memory on my hard drive). I probably take more photographs on a weekend hike, but the beauty of this archive of photographs is that many of them were taken of permanent or temporary vegetation survey plots in reserves and forestry areas throughout the Western Cape.

The archives also contain the original plant survey records from these plots - some repeat surveys, with data starting in the 1930s and follow-up visits into the 1970s, and some once-off visits. After some sifting of data and photographs, and with the help of some of the 265 maps currently being scanned, we should be able to relocate many of these plots and see what changes have taken place over the last 50 to 70 years.

The next step

Locating and scanning these old documents, photographs and maps has been a major task, but it is just the beginning of a longer process. Once scanned, each document has to be catalogued, with all the useful information about what project it belongs to, which type of data it contains and any other useful descriptive information captured.

The eventual aim is for all this information to be made publicly available so that it can be used as the baseline for long-term ecological studies or provide the context and history of fynbos research and management for future work.

Acknowledgements

SAEON would like to thank the CSIR for making the contents of the ecological safe available for electronic archiving. We would especially like to thank Greg Forsyth and David Le Maitre for their help in accessing the documents and interpreting the filing system.

If you are interested in the contents of the Jonkershoek archives, please contact the SAEON Fynbos Node for more information.