Betsie Milne

Postdoctoral Fellow: Wetland Ecology

Betsie Milne joined the Arid Lands Node team in August 2016 after being awarded a DST-NRF Professional Development Programme postdoctoral grant. Her project sets out to characterise ephemeral pans in the Northern Cape Province with particular focus on biodiversity, but also including the use of maps and remote sensing. Ultimately, the project aims to develop a model that incorporates drivers and indicators of environmental changes of pans. In view of anthropogenic development and global change this model could serve to be a vital tool for management recommendations and decision making for pans in their landscape context, but also as a platform for long-term monitoring.

Betsie believes she was born to be an ecologist! Her passion for biodiversity conservation led her to obtain a PhD in Botany at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, where she investigated landscape ecology of Eastern Cape Thicket Mosaics. She also holds a Masters in Environmental Management from the University of the Free State and a BTech in Nature Conservation from Tshwane University of Technology. Her involvement in the mining industry of the Northern Cape since 2007 has heightened her awareness of the understudied ephemeral pans in the province and she is honoured and thrilled by the opportunity to fill this void in research.