juddkirkel's Identifications

Clanwilliam Cedar

Many of the trees are dead. Theories are a dime a dozen. My favourite is that the trees only naturally occur in fire-safe rock outcrops, where their roots additionally have access to water stored in the rock layers. The deaths are partly due to increased temperatures (pre enhanced global warming - pollen records show they loved the ice ages), the longevity of the skeletons (they take decades to rot) and recent management which is trying to keep the fires out of them, but which results in more vegetation which gets fires into the rock outcrops which kills them. Thus more frequent fires might (a big might) help them. They are serotinous (which means that they store their seeds on the plant in fire-safe capsules) and only regenerate after fires. But seed set is low, and recruitment almost non-existent. Hundreds of trees are planted annually by volunteers, but less than 30% survive the planting, and less than 1% survive the next fire. This species is listed as IUCN Critically Endangered, with 94% of monitored plants (some were planted in inappropriate habitats though) dead in the last generation. If you want to see this plant alive, in the Cedarberg named after it (although most maps now misspell this as Cederberg, after the Afrikaans Sederberg), dont wait too long.

Cyphia - Montagu WCape

Couldn^t see any leaves... And the klein karoo is now a giant swamp, so won^t be able to go back and check for leaves, without a medium-sized kayak (which I don^t have).