River Ecosystem Type

Freshwater (inland aquatic) realm

Nancy Job1

1. South African National Biodiversity Institute

Published

November 11, 2025

Summary

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South Africa’s rivers are incredibly diverse and vital for our well-being. We have an interim typology in place and are currently at work on an updated national system to understand and manage our rivers as effectively as possible. The proposed river typology update will contribute significantly towards ensuring their long-term health and the benefits they provide to all South Africans.

Descriptive image captions. As in the 2018 synthesis report, photos get descriptive captions but are not numbered.

Page body

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Label main sections using Header 2. Header 1 is the style reserved for page titles at the top - do not use it anywhere else on the page. Use consecutive higher Header numbers to label subsections.

Subsection 1 (Header 3)

Subsection 2 (Header 4)

etc.

Inserting footnotes and references

Footnotes

Use the built-in footnotes function to add notes to your text where necessary. Use notes sparingly - mainly to clarify terms.

Some text with a footnote1.

References

See Quarto documentation for different ways to cite references. For reference citations to work, there needs to be a .bib file stored in the same folder as the .qmd file. Give the .bib file a unique name (i.e. change it from the default references.bib). Make sure to edit the yaml header to reference the correct .bib file. See this bibtex reference for the formats for different types of references

Citing a journal article1.

Citing a book2.

Citing a book chapter3.

Citing a technical report4.

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Graphs and maps

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Tables

Follow the same system for creating tables. Do not use the visual editor to insert tables, as this will create a table in Quarto’s default style, and you will have to type in the data manually, making the table less reproducible if your data changes. Note that here you must use the tbl- prefix to ensure that quarto recognises it as a table.

Table 1. Add table caption here.

Information boxes

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Technical documentation

The last section of your page should contain links to technical documentation of the indicators and analyses presented on your page. Technical documentation can be in a variety of formats. It is not necessary to have all these in place, but there should at least be a technical report available in a public document repository (e.g. OPUS) or a published paper describing your methods. Edit and adapt the suggested layout below depending on what technical documentation is applicable to your page.

Other publications

Jordaan, M.S., et al. 2020. Protected areas and endemic freshwater fishes of the Cape Fold Ecoregion: missing the boat for fish conservation? Frontiers in Environmental Science 8:502042. doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2020.502042

References

1. Harris, L.R. et al. 2019. Advancing land-sea integration for ecologically meaningful coastal conservation and management. Biological Conservation 237: 81–89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2019.06.020
2. Mittermeier, R.A. et al. 1997. Megadiversity: Earth’s biologically wealthiest nations. CEMEX/Agrupacion Sierra Madre, Mexico City.
3. Wilson, J.R. et al. 2018. Indicators. In Van Wilgen, B.W. & J.R. Wilson (eds), The status of biological invasions and their management in south africa in 2017.: 13–26. South African National Biodiversity Institute, Kirstenboch; DST-NRF Centre of Excellence for Invasion Biology, Stellenbosch.
4. Von Maltitz, G. et al. 2020. National terrestrial carbon sinks assessment: Technical report. Department of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries, Pretoria.

Notes

  1. Insert a basic footnote by using the Visual editor’s Insert > Footnote. Type the footnote text into the box provided. Quarto will automatically number your references and footnotes in the order that they are inserted in the text.↩︎