Jason Donaldson joined the faculty at the Nicholas School of the Environment on Jan. 1 as an assistant professor in the Division of Environmental Natural Sciences. He studies savanna ecosystems in Serengeti National Park in Tanzania and Kruger National Park in South Africa, with a focus on how fire and wildlife management affect the distribution of trees and grasses in those systems.   

Donaldson traces his ecological bent to growing up in Cape Town, where his father worked as an entomologist for the South African National Biodiversity Institute.

“He had field sites out on some farmlands in western South Africa, and my brothers and I would go out with him while he was working, and basically be a nuisance,” Donaldson recalled.

After high school, Donaldson got a job as a safari guide, first in Kruger National Park, then in the Chyulu Hills in Kenya. Those experiences were formative, motivating him to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. His dissertation research, conducted in Kruger, showed that small, controlled burns could improve the quality of grasses for grazing animals.

Later stages of his fieldwork happened to coincide with a severe drought, which drove many herbivores toward wetter terrain beyond his study sites. Donaldson seized the opportunity to study what happened when grazers were absent.

“The grass community shifted after the end of the drought from highly productive grazing lawns to less productive and more flammable tussock grasses, which was quite surprising,” he said.

Postdoctoral research took Donaldson to the famous plains of Serengeti National Park.

“It had always been a dream of mine to work in the Serengeti system, which is the ecosystem that everyone sees on TV, where approximately 1.3 million wildebeest move in an annual migration and cross the Mara River, where many of them get caught by crocodiles,” he said.

Working with T. Michael Anderson of Wake Forest University, Donaldson found that tree establishment in the Serengeti is dramatically affected by the dynamics of fire, herbivore behavior and competition from grasses. Notably, that interplay eclipses any indirect influence from predators that prey on grass-eating herbivores.

As a postdoc and, most recently, a research associate at the University Georgia, Donaldson and colleagues examined how savanna fire influences parasite transmission among herbivores in the Serengeti. The team learned that fire kills infective parasites found in grassland and can promote growth of high-quality patches of grass with low parasite exposure risk.

In his new role at Duke, Donaldson is eager to continue working in East and South Africa, concentrating on the impacts of increasing human development on the savannas of Serengeti and Kruger national parks.

He’s also interested in studying wildlife closer to campus — namely, native red wolves that prowl the Albemarle peninsula. A recovery effort to reintroduce red wolves to the wild presents an opportunity to study predator dynamics along the N.C. coast, he said.

Duke isn’t entirely unfamiliar to Donaldson. In 2014, he taught several ecology courses for the Organization for Tropical Studies, an international consortium of academic and research institutions dedicated to cultivating knowledge of the tropics and responsible use of its natural resources.  

“I taught a lot of Duke students during that time,” Donaldson said. Now, as a full-time faculty member, “I think it’ll be really fun to mentor students that are looking to set up big field experiments, because that’s really what my work does.”