Kalahari Meerkat Project Northern Cape, South Africa, close to the border to Botswana, the project is jointly funded by Cambridge University and the Kalahari Research Trust. The project was founded in the early nineties by researchers (Prof. Tim Clutton-Brock) at Cambridge University. It was originally based on the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, but in 1993 moved to the Kuruman River Reserve, an area spanning approximately twenty square miles of semi-arid area of the Kalahari Desert on either side of the mostly dry Kuruman River. The reserve consists primarily of sparsely vegetated fossil dunes that flatten out near the river, which is usually dry. The
Kalahari Desert Kalahari, except on salt pans during the dry season, the vegetation cover can be clearly denser, up to almost 100% in some limited areas. In an area of about 600,000 km in the south and west of the Kalahari, the vegetation is mainly xeric savanna. This area is the ecoregion identified by World Wide Fund for Nature as Kalahari xeric savanna AT1309. Typical savanna grasses include ("Schmidtia", "Stipagrostis", "Aristida", and "Eragrostis") interspersed with trees such as camelthorn ("Acacia erioloba"), grey camelthorn ("Acacia haematoxylon"), shepherd’s tree ("Boscia albitrunca"), blackthorn ("Acacia mellifera"), and silver cluster-leaf ("Terminalia sericea"). In certain areas where the