Emilia did her thesis work in South Africa

Who am I?

My name is Emilia and I'm 25 years old and have always been passionate for conservation of wildlife and to contribute to protecting it from human disturbance. I have had a special focus for many years on the poaching crisis that is threatening elephants and rhinos in Africa and was lucky to find this project in South Africa where I got to do my master's degree project.

What is your Master's thesis about?

I investigated the impact of white rhinos on the savanna grassland structure and how poaching on these animals indirectly could interrupt this process by reducing the white rhino population.

What did you find out?

I found that grass biomass was lower and the proportion of the nutritious lawn grass was higher in areas that were used more by rhinos. These lawn grasses are very important for other herbivores and the hypothesis is that grazing by rhinos would indirectly increase the growth of lawn grasses.

Poaching did not correlate with rhino density in this study, but I still found that lawn grass proportion was higher in areas with high poaching intensity, which might indicate that high poaching represents high rhino density. This could make sense since poachers would be attracted to sites where the rhinos are more abundant. But in the future, if poaching increases, it will most likely result in lower rhino density.