Vegetation change in northern KwaZulu-Natal since the Anglo-Zulu War

Historic photographs have been successfully used to compare landscape change over time. I used photographs taken of the grassland biome during and just after the Anglo-Zulu War (1879) in KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa), which are some of the earliest known available landscape photographs. The study area encompassed Fugitives ’ Drift, Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift and included communal and commercial rangelands, as well as conservation areas. These fixed-point photographs showed a dramatic increase in woody cover (< 82.5%) since the Anglo-Zulu War in all three land-use types. Floristic sampling showed that while vegetation structure did not differ significantly, plant species diversity and richness differed significantly for each land-use type. I also used a set of aerial photographs to give a much wider perspective of the landscape changes for the study area from 1944 to 2005. These images indicated that the increase in woody cover was progressive, with most of the woody plant recruitment occurring prior to 1964. Thereafter, the increase in woody plant cover was due to bush-clump thickening rather than recruitment into grasslands. This pattern did not occur, however, in the commercial rangeland, where recruitment into open grasslan