Every meal starts with sunlight. Through photosynthesis, plants capture solar energy and use it to produce the biomass that ultimately becomes our food. Measurements of photosynthesis can also provide an early indication of how plants respond to environmental stress, before visible symptoms develop.

This inaugural lecture examines how research on photosynthesis and plant stress physiology has advanced our understanding of crop resilience and food security. Work on plants exposed to drought, heat, ozone and changing CO₂ concentrations, together with studies on Welwitschia mirabilis, quinoa and amaranth, has shown that plant resilience is not based on a single characteristic. It depends on how effectively a plant can adjust its physiology under stress and how well it can recover when conditions improve.

A consistent finding from this work is that several crops that receive relatively little attention in modern agriculture exhibit strong photosynthetic acclimatisation to adverse conditions and a notable ability to recover from stress. In many cases, these responses are stronger than those observed in conventional crops. These characteristics could become increasingly important as crops are exposed to higher temperatures, water limitation and greater climatic variability.

Breeding, genomic selection and gene-editing technologies such as CRISPR will continue to play an important role in developing more resilient crops. However, producing and evaluating new cultivars takes time. At the same time, valuable stress resilience already exists in crops that have received too little scientific and agricultural attention.

Future food security may depend on more effective use of both approaches.

This lecture explores the challenges of managing protected areas in dynamic landscapes. Drawing on personal experience, research, and the foundational “laws of geography”, this examination of the significance of boundaries in conservation explores three themes: drawing, holding and walking the line. The lecture argues that a legal boundary on a map is only the starting point. Protected areas remain closely connected to what happens around them, including changing land uses, stakeholder relationships, development pressures and environmental change. It therefore considers how well existing instruments, such as environmental impact assessments and buffer zones, are responding to these pressures, and where current practice and governance continue to fall short.

The lecture then introduces antifragility as a possible way of thinking differently about the problem. Rather than developing management arrangements that are primarily aimed at resisting disturbance and returning to a previous condition, antifragility asks whether we can use disturbance as an opportunity to learn, adapt and improve how we respond to future change.

The central argument is that the future of protected areas will depend not only on the strength of their formal boundaries, but on how well we understand and manage the shared and changing landscapes around them.

We all want a better life and, just as importantly, we want it for our children as well. To achieve this, the United Nations created the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which, if met, would drastically improve the quality of life of a large part of the human population today, and for all of humankind in the future.

Improved soil management can influence 16 of the 17 SDGs, which could make soil the superhero of sustainability. The good news is that soil occurs everywhere on land, so there is no shortage of it. The bad news, however, is that soil is seldom part of discussions on sustainability, partly due to the difficulty of measuring soil, which is a requirement for its proper management.

This inaugural lecture views technological advances in soil measurement through the lens of the SDGs and shows how soil can fulfil its sustainability superhero status.

Environmental pollution, waste generation and ecosystem degradation are often regarded as distinct environmental challenges. In reality, they are closely interconnected and require integrated scientific understanding and management responses. This inaugural lecture reflects on the evolution of the research by Prof. Claudine Alberts (Roos) over the past two decades through three themes: environmental ecotoxicology and persistent organic pollutants, integrated waste management and governance, and responsible waste management in protected areas.

The lecture begins with the Dirty Dozen – persistent organic pollutants (POPs) identified under the Stockholm Convention. Prof. Alberts's early research focused on understanding the occurrence, distribution and ecological significance of POPs in South African sediments and other environmental media, including fish tissue and bird eggs. Conducted as part of the Persistent Organic Pollutants in the Water Environment project of the Water Research Commission, this work helped establish a scientific baseline for POP contamination in South African aquatic environments. Her research also extended to broader questions of ecosystem health through investigations associated with the mass Nile crocodile mortalities in the Kruger National Park during 2007 and 2008, providing an early foundation for her current research interest in protected areas.

Understanding pollution alone, however, is insufficient to prevent environmental degradation. The second part of the lecture explores Prof. Alberts's transition from measuring contamination to addressing its causes through the Three Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle), focusing on integrated waste management and environmental governance. Her research increasingly recognised waste not only as an environmental problem, but also as a governance, planning and behavioural challenge.

The final part of the lecture focuses on the Big Five and the protected landscapes they represent. The research focus narrows to responsible waste management in protected areas, recognising that effective waste management is fundamental to maintaining ecological integrity and supporting conservation objectives. Beginning with research in the Sabi Sand Wildtuin, this work developed into a research niche exploring waste-related behaviour, management practices and governance in protected areas. The resulting principles for responsible waste management in protected areas, together with subsequent futures-thinking research conducted across all 21 South African National Parks, demonstrate how evidence-based research can inform policy and practical management decisions.

These three themes illustrate the progression of a research career from understanding environmental harm, to addressing it through improved waste management and governance, and ultimately guiding and directing responsible waste management in protected areas at a policy level.
 

Multipronged nutritional strategies for sustainable animal production and food security

Prof Mnisi’s research focuses on developing sustainable multi-tiered nutritional strategies to enhance productivity, health and environmental resilience in ruminant and poultry production systems. These strategies are designed to reduce feed costs by using locally available, underexploited plant materials; enhance nutrient utilisation through feed processing and enzyme supplementation; promote animal resilience by replacing antibiotic growth promoters with plant-based nutraceuticals; and combining a wide range of phytogenics and conventional feed additives to improve animal welfare, reduce rearing stress and contribute to safer and more sustainable animal production systems.

His work not only addresses global food security challenges but also emphasises practical solutions for environmentally friendly and socio-economically viable animal agriculture systems. Through his extensive research work and numerous student mentorships, his research has made a measurable impact on animal nutrition, particularly in the advancement of quail nutrition research and feed innovation for resource-poor farmers. He underscores the role of poultry and ruminants as a community-level strategy to combat hunger and food insecurity.

These efforts align strongly with achieving food security, environmental stewardship and animal health. Overall, Prof Mnisi’s work provides holistic solutions to contemporary challenges in animal production, aligning with global efforts to ensure sustainable, secure and safe food systems.

The silent sentinel: machine learning’s role in securing and ensuring reliable software systems

In today's rapidly evolving digital age, software systems have become indispensable, with their complexity and criticality increasing exponentially. Consequently, ensuring their reliability, security and overall quality is more crucial than ever to provide societal infrastructure, drive innovation and safeguard sensitive information. As the world grows increasingly dependent on interconnected technologies, the need for robust and trustworthy systems has never been greater. Traditional quality assurance (QA) methods, while valuable, often struggle to keep pace with the complexity and scale of modern software, leaving systems vulnerable to failures, security threats and performance issues.

This lecture explores how machine learning (ML) is revolutionising QA, as a “silent sentinel”, an ever-watchful guardian, offering a smarter, more proactive approach to ensuring system dependability. Through the integration of ML into modern QA processes, traditional methods are transcended, enabling systems to continuously monitor, detect vulnerabilities, predict potential failures and respond to threats in real time. By applying tools like intelligent anomaly detection, preventive maintenance and real-time threat response, ML fosters resilient, self-healing systems that enhance functionality, performance and security. It delves into the transformative potential of ML in system dependability, highlighting modern innovations and current challenges, and envisioning the future of intelligent, self-sustaining systems. Drawing on real-world case studies and emerging research, the discussion will prove how ML redefines or reshapes the assurance of reliable and secure software systems. In addition, ethical implications and responsibilities inherent in adopting such technologies are discussed.

It concludes by emphasising that, in an age of intelligent systems, ML is a vital tool in constructing software systems that meet the highest standards of quality and trust. Interdisciplinary research and collaboration are essential to bring about a more reliable and sustainable digital future.

Uncertainty, structure and change: a non-parametric perspective

Statistical methods help us navigate uncertainty when we are faced with data, offering structure in a world filled with noise. But how reliable are these methods, and how realistic are the assumptions upon which they are built? Furthermore, can we determine when the structure we believe in begins to change? This lecture explores these questions through the lens of non-parametric statistics, an approach that deliberately limits parametric assumptions and lets the data speak for itself. As concrete examples, I present several new procedures for detecting structural change in high-dimensional panel data – a type of multivariate time-series data commonly encountered in econometrics and finance. These detection procedures are non-parametric in the sense that they are valid for a broad class of popular models used in practical applications. A key idea that will be covered is how these procedures can be adapted to be self-normalising, in other words, so that the detection rules do not depend on nuisance parameters that are notoriously difficult to estimate without strong parametric assumptions. The procedures retain their favourable properties even in the presence of weak serial and cross-sectional dependence. These procedures are also extended to online detection procedures, where data arrives sequentially and structural changes must be identified in real time. While the methods are mathematically intricate, their purpose remains straightforward: to help distinguish actual effects from coincidental ones when uncertainty exists.

No diagnostics, no disease control

Diagnosis is the first line of disease control, followed by treatment and management and once again diagnosis to monitor the success of the treatment. The same applies to prevention strategies, where diagnosis is conducted on a large scale through epidemiological studies, then prevention measures such as vaccinations and quarantines are applied. The success of prevention strategies is further monitored using diagnostic techniques. Observation of clinical signs and symptoms for any animal or human infection serves as the first step of a diagnosis. For laboratory diagnosis, microscopy remains the mainstay of diagnostic techniques. Serological assays that detect antibodies from plasma samples are also serving as routine diagnostic techniques especially for large-scale screening. The advent of DNA technology has revolutionised diagnostics, as DNA-based diagnostic assays are more specific and highly sensitive in order to detect infectious agents in humans and animals. My diagnostic research projects have focused on the adoption of loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for the diagnosis of various pathogens. As a result, together with various collaborators, I have developed DNA-based LAMP and PCR assays targeting specific gene fragments for the diagnosis of various animal and human diseases, including trypanosomosis, theileriosis, babesiosis, toxoplasmosis, Newcastle disease, bovine tuberculosis and brucellosis.