New plant records for Tankwa Karoo National Park, South Africa

Abstract

The Tankwa Karoo National Park has been enlarged from 27 064 ha to 143 600 ha. This whole area is severely under-collected for plants in general and therefore it was an obvious target for the South African National Parks (SANParks) Programme, a component of the Pretoria National Herbarium (PRE) Plant Collecting Programme. This programme not only aims to survey national parks that have been poorly surveyed, but also inadequately known taxa, unique habitats, remote and inaccessible areas and plant species flowering at irregular times, especially after events such as fire or unusual timing of, or high, rainfall. General collecting in the Tankwa Karoo National Park has already led to the description of two new taxa, from two families. It furthermore resulted in new distribution records for the park and for the Northern Cape Province. These are reported on here.Conservation implications: Although the Tankwa Karoo National Park falls within the Succulent Karoo Biome (a biodiversity hotspot of international importance), information on its plant diversity is insufficient because it is an under-collected area. Results of this study will guide conservation and supply occurrence and distribution data required to compile management plans for the park.

<p><strong>Centres of moss diversity in southern Africa</strong></p>

“…The original dataset was updated with the geographical distributions of new species and records of southern African mosses published up to 2011 (Anderson 1997;Arts 1998;Blockeel et al 2001Blockeel et al , 2002Blockeel et al , 2003Blockeel et al , 2005Blockeel et al , 2006Camara & Magill 2009;Cano 2011;Ellis et al 2011;Frahm 1998;Frahm & hedderson 2004;hedderson & Zander 2007hedderson & Zander , 2007ahedderson & Zander , 2008hedderson & Zander , 2008ahodgetts et al 1999;Lara et al 2009;Matcham & Duckett 2003;Rao 2001;Snider et al 1999;Sollman 1998Sollman , 2006Sollman , 2009Van Rooy 2011;Vanderpoorten & Barker 2004;Zander & hedderson 2009Zander & hedderson , 2011Zander & hedderson , 2011a. Recent moss records from the Tankwa Karoo National Park, a previously under-collected area (Bester et al 2012), have also been incorporated. As a result of the dataset update, four previously empty grid squares now have species records and 57 grids had their species counts increased by between one and 17.…”