In her spare time, Kyra is also a CREW member and a committee member of the Thicket Forum. Her interests are in landscape ecology, land cover change, land degradation, social-ecological systems and knowledge management. She has served in her current role with the UNDP since 2019. Prior to this, she worked in two roles with the Rhodes Restoration Research Group as a GIS and Knowledge Manager for the Tsitsa Project, and as a researcher on thicket-related work. In her role, she co-authored the Subtropical Thicket Research and Praxis Strategy and in earlier years worked mapping illegal deforestation and conducted carbon and biodiversity baselines for a long-term thicket monitoring project. Kyra has also worked as an independent consultant, contributing to specialist botanical assessments of EIAs for citrus and wind farms in the Eastern Cape.

She is well travelled, and spent time exploring Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, working for a river expedition tour group. Here her interest in the natural world and people’s relationship with their environment was piqued.  

Murray is the co-owner of Part Time FD and DoughGetters Accounting. He provides part-time financial director services and uses his strategic abilities and love of technology to design and implement financial systems and business strategies for clients, a role he has undertaken since 2011.

Prior to this, he served as Financial Director of Strategic Insurance Systems, an insurance underwriter, and before that he was Group Financial Director of the X-PLOR Group, a subsidiary of the Dimension Data Group, where he was based in the United Kingdom. X-PLOR provided network testing and revenue assurance solutions to clients such as O2, Orange, Vodacom and MTN.

Between the mid 1990s and 2000, he represented Country Escapes Premium Leisure in South Africa as Group Financial Manager, and moving to London in 1999, he joined Delta UK Land Developments PLC as Director of Finance.

Murray earned the leadership position of Bombardier in the Anti-Aircraft Corp during his national service. He is also a member of MENSA.

He brings a wealth of financial and general business experience to the BotSoc team.

Prior to this, she served as a Knowledge and Futurology Specialist at 20812 Consultancy. As a consultant, she played a key role in establishing knowledge managment units and systems at public and private companies, including Trans-Caledon Tunnel Authority, Technology Innovation Agency, Sasol, Anix Telecoms, eSoftware Solutions and Magalies Water.

She has also worked for the Department of Agriculture as Information and Content Manager, working to improve stakeholder content; and prior to this as Information Management Coordinator for the State Information Technology Agency. Mahlogonolo also interned at the South African Reserve Bank, helping to transition the organisation to an electronic library system.

She moved to a 20-hectare stretch of untouched Strandveld in 1993, where she started and managed Die Winkel op Paternoster, and later the Voorstrandt Restaurant in Paternoster.

During the course of her career, she was involved with the veld food and medicinal plant garden at the Hout Bay Museum. She also worked with Dr Renata Coetzee in her work with Veld Food research and recipe development into the food culture of the KhoinKhoin, and her books, ‘Koekamakranka’ and ‘A Feast from Nature’.

She also remains passionately involved with the food garden at the ‘Kinder Foerdern Zukunft Stiften’, a German non-profit organisation working with local children after school hours.

Kathleen also currently holds a Post-Doctoral position at Rhodes University in Makhanda, where she is project lead on a research project looking at water use efficiency of Cannabis sativa in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. She has also hosted the Rhodes Restoration Research Group, of the Department of Environmental Science, which undertook research and monitoring of Thicket vegetation.

She was awarded her PhD in 2016 from the University of Witwatersrand, completing her research into the role of vegetation in regional climate regulation feedback processes.

Other past positions include course coordinator for the Masters in Environmental Science and Interdisciplinary Global Change Studies Programme at Wits University; as well as consultant for the IUCN Climate Change Specialist group since 2015. And she served as editor and organiser of the Assessment of South African Elephant Management in 2007/08.