Abstract
Taxonomic revisions, monographs and floras are the most important, and often the only source of data for assessing the extinction risk of plants, with recent revisions contributing to more accurate assessments. The recently completed Red List of South African plants involved an overview of the taxonomic literature pertaining to the South African flora, providing an opportunity to identify critical gaps in taxonomic coverage. In this study we identified taxonomic research priorities for effective conservation of South African plants. Priorities were identified at genus level, according to time since last revision, level of endemism, collecting effort, proportion of taxa included in revisions, and specimen identification confidence. Although the results indicate that 62% of the flora has been recently revised, revisionary taxonomic output has declined drastically, particularly in the past 10 years. This decline is a result of a decrease in revisionary productivity per taxonomist and not a result of a decline in the number of working taxonomists. The family Aizoaceae is the top priority for taxonomic research with 55% of taxa in need of revision, followed by Hyacinthaceae with 34% of taxa not yet revised. Ericaceae, Euphorbiaceae, Rutaceae, Malvaceae, Asteraceae and Acanthaceae are also priorities with over 30% of taxa last revised before 1970. We recommend the reinstatement of the Flora of Southern Africa project in an online format in order to centralise South Africa’s existing taxonomic information and reinvigorate revisionary taxonomic study. This project will allow South Africa to fulfil its commitments to the Convention on Biodiversity by achieving Target 1 of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation.
Highlights
The first comprehensive Red List of the indigenous vascular plants of South Africa was published in 2009.1 The Red List project involved the evaluation of more than 20 000 plant taxa against scientifically based, quantitative criteria for the determination of extinction risk.[2,3] These criteria demand data on population size, rates of population decline, range size, number and location of subpopulations, and knowledge of threats, ecology and biology of species
As taxonomic treatments can take many forms, and there is no strict definition of what must be included in each of these types of treatments, for the purposes of this study, any treatment that contained an identification key to species level, scientific names listed together with their protologue citations, type specimens, and synonyms, were included. Partial revisions, such as for subgenera and subcountry geographical regions, were included, but short taxonomic notes, such as revisions of species complexes and descriptions of new taxa, were excluded. Such shorter publications contribute to the bulk of taxonomic literature available on the South African flora, it has been noted that there is a trend to publish taxonomic notes instead of complete revisions or monographs, when revisionary research is undertaken as part of postgraduate studies, with the full revision remaining unpublished in a dissertation
The analysis revealed that 62% of the South African flora has been revised recently enough to support conservation assessments (Figure 1), but that 8% of recent treatments (5% of the flora) remain unpublished
Summary
The first comprehensive Red List of the indigenous vascular plants of South Africa was published in 2009.1 The Red List project involved the evaluation of more than 20 000 plant taxa (species, subspecies and varieties) against scientifically based, quantitative criteria for the determination of extinction risk.[2,3] These criteria demand data on population size, rates of population decline, range size, number and location of subpopulations, and knowledge of threats, ecology and biology of species Such data are available for only a small number of well-studied species; the criteria are flexible enough to allow estimation and inference of criteria parameters in the absence of high-quality observation data.[2] For example range size may be estimated based on georeferenced herbarium specimens and population decline may be inferred if the extent of a species’ habitat is known to be decreasing as a result of human impact. Groups of species that are taxonomically well studied are generally better known biologically, while those that are in need of taxonomic revision tend to remain poorly known species
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