The allocation of land to biological diversity conservation competes with other land uses and the needs of society for development, food, and extraction of natural resources. Trade-offs between biological diversity conservation and alternative land uses are unavoidable, given the realities of limited conservation resources and the competing demands of society. We developed a conservation-planning assessment for the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, which forms the central component of the Maputaland-Pondoland-Albany biological diversity hotspot. Our objective was to enhance biological diversity protection while promoting sustainable development and providing spatial guidance in the resolution of potential policy conflicts over priority areas for conservation at risk of transformation. The conservation-planning assessment combined spatial-distribution models for 646 conservation features, spatial economic-return models for 28 alternative land uses, and spatial maps for 4 threats. Nature-based tourism businesses were competitive with other land uses and could provide revenues of >US$60 million/year to local stakeholders and simultaneously help meeting conservation goals for almost half the conservation features in the planning region. Accounting for opportunity costs substantially decreased conflicts between biological diversity, agricultural use, commercial forestry, and mining. Accounting for economic benefits arising from conservation and reducing potential policy conflicts with alternative plans for development can provide opportunities for successful strategies that combine conservation and sustainable development and facilitate conservation action.

Systematic conservation planning is intended to inform spatially explicit decision making. Doing so requires that it be integrated into complex regulatory and governance processes, and there are limited instances where this has been achieved effectively. South Africa is a global leader in the application of conservation plans, the outputs of which are widely used for spatial planning and decision making in many spheres of government. We aimed to determine how conservation planning in the country progressed from theory to implementation, and to identify practical actions that enabled this transition, by assessing temporal trends in the characteristics of conservation plans (1990–2017, n = 94). Since 2010 conservation planning has entered an operational period characterized by government leadership of plans, administrative rather than ecological planning domains, decreasing size of planning units, increasing emphasis on end‐user products, and scheduled revision of plans. Key actions that enabled this progression include transitioning leadership of plans from scientists to practitioners, building capacity within implementing agencies, creating opportunities to integrate plans in legislative processes, establishing a strong community of practice, adopting implementation‐focused methods, and balancing standardization with innovation. Learning from this model will allow other countries, particularly those with a similar megadiverse, developing context, to operationalize conservation planning into spatial planning and decision making.

Over 160 publications that contain mineralogical information were produced in the last 25 years of which about half were published in national and international journals. In many articles mineralogical data were presented but not discussed. Most studies were concerned with the clay fraction and X-ray diffraction was the dominant technique used for mineral identification. The investigations covered a very wide range of topics such as inheritance of clays from parent materials, and broad regional studies at Lusikisiki and in the Western Cape Province. Studies of mineralogy in relation to soil properties such as erodibility, the susceptibility of minerals to dispersion, and the importance of the mineral fraction for K-fixation were undertaken. Pedological research included the red-black sequences of the Springbok Flats and Kruger Park, podzols of the Cape Province and major mineralogical investigations of melanic, vertic and humic horizons. Other aspects reviewed are concerned with environmental history, engineering, rehabilitation and archaeology. The future of mineralogy in South Africa appears bleak due to the lack of mineralogical training being offered at tertiary education establishments. It is hoped that this. review will rekindle an interest in soil mineralogy as a topic that impacts on an ever-widening range of soilrelated topics.

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