Meet The Biobank: SANParks Veterinary Wildlife Services – A Walk On The Wild Side

There are many unique and interesting biobanks in the Biodiversity Biobanks South Africa (BBSA) network. But few of them are quite as wild and wonderful as the SANParks Veterinary Wildlife Services biobanks at Skukuza and Kimberley.

SANPARKS is a government conservation authority with a mandate to conserve, protect, control and manage South Africa’s national parks – a system of 20 functional national parks in 7 of the 9 provinces of South Africa with a total area of over 4 million hectares.

This unique and biodiverse environment of free-roaming wildlife offers a perfect opportunity for the SANParks Veterinary Wildlife Services (VWS) unit, who are responsible for wildlife capture and translocation, to collect valuable samples from dozens of species, from badgers to buffalo (and more).

But what happens to all those samples? Who could possibly make sense of all that data? And what do they use it for?

That’s where SANParks VWS Biobank comes into it. With two biobanks, one in Skukuza in the Kruger National Park and one in Kimberley, and over twenty years of experience, VWS combines best practice with flexibility to respond to organisational and environmental changes – and meet ever-evolving researcher requirements.

Here’s how they do it.

Want to know more about the SANPARKS Veterinary Wildlife Biobanks? We’ve got you covered. Or find out about the other BBSA partner institutions here. And while you’re at it, why not learn more about what biobanks are (and aren’t) all about?