In an academic career spanning some 40 years, Professor Richard Cowling has aspired to contribute to both curiosity and applied research while at the same time remaining steadfastly engaged in research implementation and community outreach.
In doing so, he and his team have conducted research on plant diversity and evolution, conservation science, restoration ecology and palaeoecology. His social engagement has influenced conservation practice and policy in South Africa, especially in the fields of sustainable land use planning, protected area expansion and restoration of degraded ecosystems.
Actions arising from these policy shifts have underpinned substantive employment benefits in the growing biodiversity economy.
He obtained his BSc in Botany from the University of Cape Town where he also completed his Honours and PhD. He completed a postdoctoral Fellowship at Curtin University in Australia before moving to the University of Port Elizabeth (now Nelson Mandela University) to take up a post as Senior Research Associate.
He later worked as a scientific coordinator for the CSIR before he joined UCT as a Lecturer and then Associate Professor in Botany.
He was also the Leslie Hill Professor of Plant Conservation and Director of the Leslie Hill Institute for Plant Conservation at UCT.
Over the last 36 years, Prof Cowling served on 64 committees in his capacity as an academic and scientist. In 13 of these committees, he played a leadership role. Almost all of this committee work has related to his applied research in conservation and restoration, and most has been at a regional or national level. However, 12 of these committees have been global in scope and involved service to organisations such as Conservation International, the World Wide Fund for Nature, IUCN and the World Bank.
He was amongst a group of scientists who persuaded politicians post the 1994 democratic elections to invest in the removal of invasive alien plants to secure key ecosystem services (mainly water) and create large numbers of jobs for unskilled workers. This led to the globally renowned Working for Water programme which, by 2020, had cleared 2.7 million ha of invaded land while creating the equivalent of 180 000 full-time jobs.
His work has resulted in the establishment of numerous conservation areas which have included 330 ha of critically endangered coastal dune habitat around Cape St Francis. Through the Leslie Hill Succulent Karoo Trust, which he established to secure the conservation of priority regions in the poorly conserved Succulent Karoo biome, the Knersvlakte Nature Reserve was expanded to 125 000 ha and the Namaqua National Park was expanded from 1 000 ha to 140 000 ha. He also played a key role in the proclamation of the Agulhas and Table Mountain National Parks in the late 1990s.
Prof Cowling’s contributions to science have received both local and international acclaim. He was awarded a Gold Medal from the South African Association for the Advancement of Science in 2009 and from the South African Association of Botanists in 2014. He also won the Marloth Medal from the Royal Society of South Africa and the Science for Society Award from the Academy of Science of South Africa.
He was elected a Foreign Member of the National Academy of Sciences in the USA in 2008 and, in 2012, was elected a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America. ISIHighlyCited.com recognised him as among the 250 most-cited researchers in Ecology and Environment between 1981 and 2005, and he received a Distinguished Service Award from the USA’s Society for Conservation Biology.
His more than 430 peer-reviewed articles have appeared in high leading journals such as Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Of those articles, 56 have been cited more than 200 times. His Google Scholar h-index, as of mid-March 2024, was 115, based on 44 098 citations. He has also authored/co-authored three popular books on Fynbos, the winter-rainfall Succulent Karoo, and Subtropical Thicket biomes of the Cape Floristic Region.
Over the course of his career he has supervised 83 postgraduate and postdoctoral students.