Spring has sprung! We have an amazing line-up of events for the rest of the year, including our very popular spring flower walk, the Great Southern Bioblitz, Tuesday and Saturday hacks and vegetation surveys :) Also don't miss the great talk about fynbos and fires. Read this newsletter for all our latest info and news.

What is in this newsletter?
1) Sign-up opportunities: Sign up for our Spring Walk 2021, and our Restoration Trail Campaign
2) News: Updates about our active restoration efforts (Silvertree planting), a fantastic talk about fynbos and fires, the TMNP Forum, the TCMF process, the Great Southern Bioblitz, updating our FOTP Living Alien Tree Map and damage caused to the fynbos at Tokai Park by firefighters this winter.
3) Events: Please scroll down and diarize our events for September to November 2021!
4) Donate: We are running some amazing programmes, please do support us. 

Thank you for your continued support.

With over 550 native plant species, Tokai Park is one of the richest places for seeing botanical wonders within the City of Cape Town, and arguably in the world. Join our experts, including Dr Tony Rebelo and Prof Patricia Holmes, as they give a guided botanical tour of the lowland fynbos at Tokai Park, with a focus on the spring flowering beauties. These are mainly lowland fynbos species that have emerged following the removal of pine plantations, surviving in seedbanks under the ground for decades.

Date: Saturday 9 October
Time: 2:30-4pm
Sign up here: https://forms.gle/BbqtJRPmG79WbdBC9
Please note that numbers are limited.

This year the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration kicks off! The Tokai Park Restoration Trail is the perfect introduction for people who would like to understand ecological processes in fynbos in general or learn more about Cape Flats Sand Fynbos in particular. However, this trail is now in need of some TLC. The signage needs to be updated, and more seriously, the walkways need maintenance as they have become dangerous. 

We are really delighted by the interest we have on this project lately from members, with someone volunteering their time and expertise to assist with trail maintenance, and other members making very generous donations. We would therefore like to keep this momentum going, and would like to invite all of you join in. We are busy investigating which materials are the most sustainable to use, but hope to begin work on this project as soon as we reach our funding target (see the last post in this newsletter for details). Do you have experience with trail maintenance or signage? Can you volunteer some time? Or do you have materials you could donate? Or are you interested in pitching in by way of donation? All kinds of help are welcome! 

Following on from SANParks Honorary Rangers' “Planks of Thanks” project at Lower Tokai Park, we are encouraging donations at R50 for a plank installed by hand and laid with love. 

On Friday 6 August the Friends of Tokai Park (FOTP), along with South African National Biodiversity Institute and SANParks - Table Mountain National Park did active restoration at Upper Tokai Park, planting Silvertree Seedlings! Thank you very much to all who attended for a great planting, it was an excellent effort by all, and a long day. The rains came and so the timing worked out very well. This concludes our official planned active restoration planting for 2021. 

FoTP will organize a hack in November 2021 to remove any aliens from this area just restored, most especially in the South Block. Please feel free to join us on the hacks: we will be keeping both the Silvertree and the Prinskasteel Wetlands clear of aliens, although the Prinskasteel is looking like an alien carpet at present (but too small to pull yet). So: lots of work coming our way soon! 

Photo credits: Zoe Poulsen

As winter draws to a close and our summer fire season looms (with summer starting in December) we again turn our attention to Table Mountain National Park and wonder what this next season will hold. Will the management efforts have been enough? What about the areas still infested with invasive alien trees, like Newlands and Rondebosch?

Did you know that Fynbos lives to die? If Fynbos plants can engineer their ecosystems using fire to manage their future, why can we not? Should we be putting out fires or starting them? It is more dangerous to suppress fires than to manage them.

We will not ever get rid of wildfire, it is here to stay. The question is: what type of fire would you prefer? An alien tree fueled fire (left) or a fynbos fire (right).

Find out more in Prof Tony Rebelo's talk here: https://youtu.be/ZwV0ii3ctQ0

The Friends of Tokai Park (FOTP) are being represented on the Table Mountain National Park (TMNP) Forum by Dr Alanna Rebelo. This forum has three sub-committees, and FOTP sits on the "Maintenance & Permits" subcommittee. Please feel free to reach out to us if you have any issues you want raised there. 

The aim of the TMNP Forum is to encourage the building of partnerships in support of the natural and cultural heritage conservation goals of SANParks. They are a means of providing a legitimate platform to communicate Park/SANParks/stakeholder issues, to ensure greater participation of stakeholders on matters of mutual relevance and to facilitate constructive interaction between the Parks and surrounding communities.

The process has been much contested, with Take Back Our Mountain (TBOM) boycotting the process and FOTP have also had serious complaints about the process which to date have been ignored. The press release by SANParks today about the newly elected forum committee and subcommittees can be seen here. 

The Tokai Ceclilia Management Framework (TCMF) Review Process has reached Phase 2 (focused workshops). The date for the commencement of the focused workshops is Monday 13 September 2021. It is envisaged that the 9 focused workshops will take place between 20 September and 31 October. Please do diarize these important dates. More details to follow. 

The written submissions received from the stakeholders in the TCMF Review Process are available on the TCMF Website, here. The recording of the stakeholder engagement and public meeting held on Thursday 05 August 2021 is also available on the TCMF Website.

You can download a copy of the Friends of Tokai Park's statement here and read a summary of our vision below. 

Our recent FOTP intern (Matthew Collins) has been working on updating our Living Maps along with committee member, Dr Alanna Rebelo. His task: to explore change detection and see whether this is a useful method to detect and map alien tree clearing. The hope is that this method could also be used to detect alien tree invasion.

For this task, they compared the winters of 2020 and 2021, as many of the clearing efforts by SANParks and Working for Water fell within this period. Using the code and method developed by Glenn Moncrieff (https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/13/5/834), they fed the algorithm three classes: aliens that stayed aliens, fynbos that stayed fynbos and then areas where aliens were cleared. The results can be seen in the video clip here, or otherwise on our website: https://www.tokaipark.com/adopt-a-plot/.

Another task that Matthew performed was to plot the probability of the change detection correctly mapping the change. This was also only completed for the Tokai Park area to keep things as simple and accurate as possible. This calculation was necessary because the situation on the ground in Tokai Park is not as simple as one would hope - the fynbos and alien vegetation are always competing with each other for space, and the cleared areas always have some leftover aliens that escaped detection. Also, it will take some time before these areas return to fynbos. Restoration is a long process not a quick fix. Looking at probability instead of absolutes helps us understand how likely the ‘cleared’ areas are to actually have been cleared (from 0-100%).

Our sincere thanks to WESSA for enabling us to create this funded internship opportunity!

The City of Cape Town is the Biodiversity Capital and Mother City, situated in the Littlest Plant Kingdom in all the world. We are participating in the second Great Southern BioBlitz 2020 that runs from 22-25 October 2021, together with cities from across the Southern Hemisphere!

The umbrella project is here: and the project website is here. See our southern African participation here: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/great-southern-bioblitz-2021-southern-africa-umbrella. See what we did last year here. 

Firefighters have been accused of being too heavy-handed in their efforts to douse a fire in Tokai Park. The firefighters put out the fire, but they lit another one under Friends of Tokai Park chairman Dr Tony Rebelo who criticised them for driving their fire engines over critically endangered Cape Flats sand fynbos in the process.

Dr Rebelo, an ecologist at the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI), says wildfires at this time of year are rare, but the deep tyre tracks left behind by the fire engines in the protected area could have a long-lasting impact on the fynbos and the wetland. “Such cowboyish behaviour cannot be condoned in critically endangered ecosystems. Why are there not guidelines?” asked Dr Rebelo.

Article by Karen Watkins. Read the full story here. 

Would you like to get involved in the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration? Are you not able to volunteer time to join in our hacks, but really appreciate the work we are doing? If yes, please consider making a donation to one of our five programmes. We have almost reached 10% of our target!

Programme 1: Alien Hacking - We need equipment for our volunteers to use, such as loppers, chainsaw blades, fuel etc. Target: R3000 -> Raised R250
Programme 2: Active Restoration - We need special funding for alien clearing work in Block A9 (Prinskasteel) and A7 (Paintball), as well as growing plants for active rehabilitation. Target: R10 000  -> Raised R1250
Programme 3: Restoration Trail - The restoration trail is in need of a make-over. We need funding for signage refreshment, as well as to fix the boardwalk. Target: R5000 -> Raised R1000
Programme 4: Tokai Arboretum - We need funding for maintenance of paths, buildings, and the gardens. Target: R10 000 
Programme 5: Tokai Path Maintenance - We need funding to support path clearing as well as signage, which has become totally faded. Target: R5000 

If you would like to make a donation, please feel free to use snapscan (below) our do a traditional EFT into our bank account. Please indicate which programme you would like to support by putting the programme number into the payment reference, as well as your name if you would like us to know who the donation is from (e.g. Smith_Prog1). 

BANK DETAILS
Friends of Tokai Park
Standard Bank
Blue Route
Savings Account
27 629 2669

WESSA Affiliation: MB1240127
PBO Tax Exemption #: 930066728

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