Statistics professor Les Underhill has helped build a new model army of citizen scientists and is busy changing the way research is done while strengthening efforts to stave off extinctions. It all began with a trip to the tundra.
Fri 25 Jun 2021 01.15 EDT
Last modified on Fri 25 Jun 2021 04.11 EDT
The fire that started on the slopes of Table Mountain on April 18 this year quickly swept through the University of Cape Town campus. The world watched in horror as the African Studies Library was burned to the ground. In the weeks that followed, volunteers waded through the waterlogged basement of the razed building to see which rare books had survived.
What few people beyond the university realised at the time is that barely 100 metres away the Department of Biological Sciences had also suffered catastrophic losses. “We’ve lost everything,” says Prof Timm Hoffman, the director of the Plant Conservation Unit (PCU), which was housed in a “highly flammable wooden turret” on the roof of the HW Pearson building.