Rate My Professor Pippin Anderson

Associate Professor Pippin Anderson is Head of the Department of Environmental and Geographical Science in the Faculty of Science at the University of Cape Town. She joined the department in 2008. Her teaching focuses primarily on physical geography while incorporating social drivers of environmental systems, including biogeography, landscape ecology, urban ecology, restoration ecology, and social-ecological systems. Anderson holds a PhD in Ecology from the University of Cape Town. Her research examines the nexus between landscape ecology and restoration, with emphasis on system function at the landscape level to support conservation and land-use objectives. Key areas include community ecology, ecosystem services, plant functional types, landscape history, conservation biology, urban ecology, and restoration ecology, often applied to contexts in Cape Town and broader urban environments.

Anderson has contributed to peer-reviewed publications such as the 2020 paper “Post-apartheid ecologies in the City of Cape Town: An examination of plant functional traits in relation to urban gradients” in Landscape and Urban Planning, as well as chapters in The Routledge Handbook of Urban Ecology (2020). More recent works include co-authored papers in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025) on nature-based solutions and articles in Ambio (2024) on urban ecology and just ecologies. She received the University of Cape Town Distinguished Teacher Award in 2023. Anderson has supervised numerous postgraduate students to completion across master’s and doctoral levels in topics related to restoration, ecosystem services, and urban ecology.