Don’t panic, Kruger Park tells residents and tourists as dry season approaches

Experts have urged tourists and residents in communities surrounding the Kruger National Park (KNP) to not panic with the dry season between August and October approaching.

A fire management and research project – which has had more than 70 years of testing fire regimes – has helped contain and avoid lightning-induced flames and wildfires within the park, according to KNP abiotic scientist Tercia Strydom.

“Fires have been part of this landscape for millions of years, meaning the vegetation and the environment that we see today evolved with fires, hence we often say that the vegetation, the trees and animals are all fire-adapted species,” she said.

Strydom said the fire experiment, which is one of the many ongoing research projects in the KNP, has been running since the ’50s. However, in recent decades, they were able to learn a lot, with satellite technology playing a huge role in containing fires within the park.

Strydom said through a satellite called Sentinel-2 and the Modus, which has two satellites going around the world twice a day, they have access to imagery of the park, which can easily pick up where exactly there is a fire and how large it could be.

“If we plan to have a firebreak and we need it controlled, we check on technology to predict which direction it would be going, while we map fires using satellite imagery,” she said.

The KNP has begun securing its firebreaks around infrastructure such as camps, staff quarters, entry gates and other key assets. It is also burning and grading firebreaks along the park’s boundary, following the burning of early-season fires to help break up the fuel load in the veld and reduce the risk of wildfires burning over large areas of the park.

“This fire experiment will be starting now – this is an August annual burn. So this burn happens every year in August: it’s windy, it’s dry, it’s hot.

“These are perfect weather conditions conducive for fires. So we burn frequently at that time of the year.”

ALSO READ: No foul play from staff suspected in Kruger Park fires

Strydom said it was important to note that fires were an important part of the system because research has shown that animals preferred the nice open grassy areas with few trees for a combination of reasons, such as the grazing quality and safety.

“On the other side of the road, you can picture what the Skukuza vegetation landscape would look like.

“It’s a very unnatural situation because fires are a regular natural occurrence in this landscape and to keep fires out of a crop like that takes a lot of effort,” she said.

“That’s really, really hard. So we use firebreaks, which get graded every year, to make sure that if there’s a fire, it doesn’t turn into that [a big fire] – and that’s the best that we can do to defy it.”