A new genus of Triuridaceae, and new species of Cola, Coffea and Diospyros are among discoveries from a botanical inventory of Mt Kupe in south-west Cameroon by Kew botanists working in collaboration with the National Herbarium of Cameroon in Yaounde (with support from the Global Environment Facility) and assisted by self-sponsored Swiss; Dutch, German, Canadian and US botanists. Earthwatch Europe supported by the European Commission paid for fieldwork costs and paid the travel and field expenses of 14 leading African plant taxonomists from Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Namibia and South Africa, together with conservation workers from governmental and NGO bodies, principally from South Africa. Inventory teams were based in four local villages and included volunteers (ecotourists) arranged Earthwatch.
The inventory was requested by the Mt Kupe Forest Project, a development-orientated project set up by BirdLife International in 1991 and soon to be passed on to WWF. The aim is to produce a descriptive guide to the flowering plants in the mountain's forests, mapping the locality of 'conservation priority' species. · Three small areas of forest under immediate threat (allocated for farming) and harbouring some of the rarest species have been rented from local farmers and are regularly monitored by Martin Etuge, the project's resident botanist. Five 25x25 m intensively inventoried plots have been executed and about 7000 specimens gathered in fieldwork carried out in Jan-Feb and Oct-Nov 1995 and completed in May-July 1996. Specimen analysis is now under way, coordinated at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
For more information contact Martin Cheek or Stuart Cable (m.cheek@bgkew.org.uk).
A Darwin Initiative grant has been secured by the Forestry Group in Bangor in collaboration with the Limbe Botanic Gardens, and Kew, to look at tree regeneration after natural disturbance events such as periodic lava flows or individual tree-falls, compared with regeneration after local use of the forest by villagers. The results should indicate what intensity and types of human disturbance to the forest could continue without posing a threat to biodiversity. The project is utilising scientific and social sciences approaches and includes a significant training element.
Contact Dr John Healey at the School of Agricultural and Forest Sciences, University of North Wales, Bangor, Gwynedd, LL57 2UW. UK. Fax: 01248 354997.