Arriving in a cold Calvinia

Renier & Millene's 37 wedding anniversary today. Congratulations!

The convoy with its precious load of people and equipment spent most of the day traveling from Raap en Skraap farm to the town of Calvinia at the foot of the Hantam Mountains. The 500 km took longer than planned because of the road works and the many stop and go areas. However it did not take long to settle in at Klipwerf Guest House in the centre of town and to pitch the tents and get the pots on the burners.

En route to Calvinia we encountered lots of road works.

Calvinia falls in the winter rainfall region and is known as the Succulent Karoo. Prof John Manning is very excited to be able to access the Hantam Mountains with the assistance of the Toyota vehicles because little surveying and collecting has been done due to the difficulty to get to the plateau. Gerhard made arrangements with the farmers to use their roads to travel to the top. The Hantam Mountains is a biodiversity hotspot and the scientists, being such a diverse group of specialist, will hopefully be able to sample the endemic species in this Renosterveld vegetation.  Prof Manning expects the amarillids to be in flower and we can just picture this floral beauty!

En route to Calvinia

Dr Cornelia Klak is a researcher from the Bolus Herbarium, University of Cape Town, where she curates and studies the Aizoaceae and other succulent plant families. The Aizoaceae is one of the most speciose plant families in South Africa, with more than 1800 species recognized. The Hantam Mountains form part of the Succulent Karoo region, an area which has a particularly high number of species of Aizoaceae. Many of these species are still poorly known and need to be studied further in order to establish the characters by which they can easily be distinguished from other similar looking species.

John Manning, Lyn Fish & Cornelia Klak

Cornelia Klak is also interested to establish the distribution ranges of species. Few collections of Aizoaceae have been made from the Hantam Mountains and it will therefore be fascinating to see what species occur there. The species of Aizoaceae found on the mountain will be collected and pressed and will be incorporated into the collection in the Bolus Herbarium. The Aizoaceae are well known for their high habitat specificity and narrow distribution ranges and therefore also the Hantam Mountains could have endemic species of Aizoaceae.

Ledile Mankga is a PhD student at the University of Johannesburg (African Center for DNA Barcoding) under Professor Michelle van der Bank. She is working on the Phylogenetic and evolutionary studies of the family Thymelaeaceae in southern Africa. Themealaeaceae consist of 800 species and it is well represented in Africa with approximately 50 genera, of which nine occur in South Africa.  The taxonomy in most of these genera remains controversial and most is based solely on morphological characters and needs revision and phylogenetic study.

Ledile Mankga out sampling earlier this week.

Ledile is excited to be part of this Toyota Enviro Outreach. She has learnt a lot about succulent plants and also how to identify them. The most exciting moment for Ledile was to look for plants in the mountains. It felt like the“hills have eyes”and are watching us.