Staff activities

From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 2, April 2020.

From February 1 to March 17, Robert Soreng traveled to South Africa and Lesotho to collect grasses and study high elevation grasslands in the Mulati-Drakensberg Mountains with Steven Sylvester (Nanjing Forestry University, China), Mitsy Sylvester, and Vincent Ralph Clark (University of the Free State, South Africa). The team made over 350 collections of grasses from 41 genera. Sets were left for the South African National Biodiversity Institute (PRE) and the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Bews Herbarium (NU); the U.S. National Herbarium (US) set is expected to be shipped to Plant Protection and Quarantine (PPQ). They also conducted vegetation surveys of over 220 plots. The team visited PRE herbarium in mid-March. Soreng flew home early to the United States from South Africa the day before the airports closed down due to travel bans related to the COVID-19 virus. The Sylvester family is stuck in South Africa indefinitely.

Drakensberg Mountains, South Africa, with a view of Sentinel Peak (right) and Devil’s Toothpick, (narrow pinnacle in center). A botanical team made over 350 collections of grasses from this area, a place that was used in filming the fictional land of Wakanda in the 2018 movie Black Panther.