Ancois de Villiers receives PeerJ Award for Best Student Presentation
Ancois de Villiers, PhD candidate at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, received the PeerJ Award for Best Student Presentation at the International Mediterranean Ecosystems Conference (MEDECOS 2022), which took place from the 5th to the 9th of September in Langebaan, South Africa.
Ancois presented some of the emerging findings from her transdisciplinary investigation of collaborative landscape-based sustainability initiatives. Her research focuses on some of the implementation challenges associated with supporting, tracking, and evaluating the psycho-social dimensions of ecosystem rehabilitation's impacts and dynamics.
Research Collaboration
The research is a collaboration between institutions in the Netherlands and South Africa, as well as academics and practitioners. This includes the interdisciplinary contributions of the supervision team, which includes Professor Marja Spierenburg (Leiden University's Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology), Prof Karen Esler (Stellenbosch University's Department of Conservation Ecology and Entomology), and Dr Jessica Cockburn (Department of Environmental Science, Rhodes University). The study is also designed and carried out in collaboration with Living Lands, a non-profit organisation that facilitates landscape-based rehabilitation projects in South Africa, and Commonland, a Dutch-based initiative promoting both socio-economic and ecological outcomes for sustainability. The research is supported by an NRF-Nuffic Doctoral Scholarship and a GreenMatter Fellowship Bursary.
Read more about Ancois research in an interview on the PeerJ blog.