Studying the efficacy of control methods is paramount to successful management of invasive pests and understanding why some colonies survive is important to improve management practices. Here, the bait Vespex® was used to control invasive wasps across 64 ha of forest in an invaded range near Hanmer Springs, New Zealand. Bait was applied across a standard 50 m by 300 m arrangement and made available for 3 days. Nest mortality r...

Ridging South Atlantic high pressure systems (ridging highs) are often accompanied by cut-off low (COL) pressure systems aloft, but may also occur without them, in which case a linear baroclinic wave would be observed propagating across the South African domain in the upper troposphere. Using 41 years of ERA-5 reanalysis data, this study documents differences between the characteristics of the prevailing dynamical processes an...

Mozambique is highly dependent on subsistence agriculture. Thus a climatology of rainfall onset and cessation is derived together with their interannual variability and trends using gridded daily data and station data. Mean onset is found to occur from early to mid‐November over southernmost regions, mid‐ to late November over central regions and late November to early December over the northern and coastal regions while cessa...

An analysis of the inter‐annual frequency of the main summer rainfall producing synoptic system [tropical temperate troughs (TTTs)] over Mozambique and the Southwest Indian Ocean and their relationships with regional sea surface temperatures and circulation patterns is presented for the January–March season. Correlations and composite anomalies based on annual frequency of occurrence of TTTs over Mozambique suggest that TTT oc...

The desert country of Namibia (southwestern Africa) and adjoining areas received anomalously heavy rains in austral summer 2006. In particular, the hyper‐arid southern Namib Desert experienced an extreme rainfall event in mid‐April 2006 which led to the coastal station of Luderitz receiving 102 mm, or about six times its annual average rainfall. Based on extreme value theory, this event appears to have a return period of 145 y...

Variability in the characteristics of cut‐off low pressure systems over subtropical southern Africa is examined for the 1973–2002 period. These characteristics include their seasonality, frequency, duration, location and size. It is found that on average 11 cut‐off lows occur over southern Africa south of 20°S per year and are most common in the March‐May season. Potential relationships between the number of cut‐off lows over...

Pteropus livingstonii , P. voeltzkowi , and P. rodricensis are three critically endangered fruit bats from western Indian Ocean islands for which multidisciplinary conservation programs have been established that include environmental education programs (EEPs). We describe these EEPs in terms of the strategies used to achieve them and evaluate the educational and conservation outcomes and impacts of the programs. Educational o...