South African landscape hydrologist and plant ecologist who spent his career at the Jonkershoek Forestry Research Centre and the CSIR, quantifying how vegetation cover, fire and invasive alien plants change water supply. David Le Maitre’s estimates of streamflow lost to alien trees supported the Working for Water programme for about 25 years. He died after a long illness; the Centre for Invasion Biology published its tribute on 15 January 2023.
Contribution
Le Maitre studied forestry at Stellenbosch University and took his MSc and PhD in plant ecology at the University of Cape Town. He joined the Jonkershoek Forestry Research Centre in 1979, moved to the CSIR in 1990 when the South African Forestry Research Institute was dissolved, and stayed until he retired in 2017. He remained an associate of the Centre for Invasion Biology at Stellenbosch.
His early work concerned fire in fynbos. He went on to build the models that estimate how much surface runoff alien tree invasions remove, and helped identify South Africa’s Strategic Water Source Areas for surface water and groundwater. He co-authored more than 200 publications and received an Eco-Logic Gold Medal for water conservation in October 2022.
His 2019 paper with Ashwin Görgens, Greg Howard and Nicholas Walker is the source for the yield figures on Bioprecipitation. It modeled the Western Cape Water Supply System and found that current invasions already reduce its assured yield by about 38 million cubic meters a year, about two-thirds of Wemmershoek Dam’s capacity, with the loss rising to about 130 million cubic meters a year by 2045 without management. The wiki uses these figures to ground the claim that coordinated restoration co-produces usable water yield.
Selected works
- Le Maitre, D.C. et al. (2016). “Estimates of the impacts of invasive alien plants on water flows in South Africa.” Water SA, 42(4), 659-672.
- Le Maitre, D.C., Görgens, A.H.M., Howard, G. & Walker, N. (2019). “Impacts of alien plant invasions on water resources and yields from the Western Cape Water Supply System (WCWSS).” Water SA, 45(4).
Related pages
- Bioprecipitation
- Performance-Based Water Bonds
- Strategic Water Source Area
- Brian van Wilgen
- D.B. van Wyk
Sources
- Le Maitre, D.C. et al. (2019)
- Brian van Wilgen, tribute to David Le Maitre, Centre for Invasion Biology (2023)
- Le Maitre et al. (2019), Water SA
Provenance
Written 23 October 2026 from the people named on Bioprecipitation, using published obituaries, institutional records and published work. Details of his illness are left out.