Table View and Blouberg parks
This is where I live now, and I have been spending a lot of time walking around the various parks, greenbelts and open spaces here since November 2023. The amount of biodiversity just hanging on in these neglected places is very surprising and I feel as though I want to pick up the torch a bit.
Particularly the two parks closest to me have been a focus and I have plans to highlight what I have found here. It's already documented on iNaturalist but that doesn't really tell a story per se. Ultimately the best result would be if it could become a community project, taking better care of these places and allowing everyone to enjoy the benefits of the natural environment.
Hydrotowns
Hydrotowns aims to look into water and environmental management through the lens of human settlement and system design.
Mezleriopsis
Mezleriopsis is the name of a subgroup of Lobelia plants - characteristically they have tiny and somewhat unique flowers as well as growing in damp or seasonally wet places. There is very little information available and so I want to try and compile what is currently known.
Southern African Plectranthinae
Generally known as spurflowers, Plectranthus is a genus of plants with their centre of diversity in Southern Africa. Some of these are among the first plants that I was able to successfully grow on my balcony and I credit them with opening the floodgates of my interest in plants. There is a really wonderful book (now out of print) The Southern African Plectranthus and the art of turning shade into glade by Ernst van Jaarsveld that details the species in SA and Namibia. Since then there have been some taxonomic changes and Plectranthus sensu lato is now more appropriately considered under the subtribe Plectranthinae (Lamiaceae). This also includes some additional related genera. I had the idea to work on a resource which provides something like the kind of information from the book, online. I also wanted to expand the remit to include a broader view of Southern Africa, including Zimbabwe, Botswana and southern Mozambique. This gives something like 130 species.
Southern African biomes, bioregions
This came out of the Plectranthus project. The question was how to parsimoniously describe the habitats of the various species. I found out that there are no modern descriptions of the Southern African region which go beyond the biome classification, besides very broad schemes which were developed on a global scale. I have been working on digitising some older regional maps and plan to see if these can be used to classify the region at a finer scale. I hope it will be possible to do this on something like the bioregion scale adopted by SANBI's VegMap project.
Southern African forest schematic
Also a product of the Plectranthus project. Many species of Plectranthus are restricted to forest environments. In Southern Africa this means an archipelago of generally isolated forest clusters. The location of these is known to some scale but they don't map well due to the small size. I had an idea of attempting to represent these forests in a semi-spatial way that might look something like a subway map - i.e. showing the spatial relationships but without direct preservation of distance or area. The aim is to use this to show the distributions of the forest Plectranthinae but I imagine if it works it could be useful for other forest species.
Rondebosch Common
The Rondebosch Common is a fairly large urban parkland which hosts an assemblage of remnant vegetation mostly associated with Cape Flats sand fynbos (although there are renosterveld elements too). I enjoy walking there and observing the changes through the seasons. As with many things on this side of the world it is often not possible to find good information on certain topics so I decided I would try to share some of the things I have picked up about the Common.
Charting Table Mountain
Mostly for fun. There are some very good physical maps out there for Table Mountain, such as the ones from Peter Slingsby's series. I don't actually have a copy and so I make do with various online sources when planning hikes. At some point I decided to start collating data myself.
Flora Capensis
Flora Capensis is an old conspectus of the plants found in the Cape. I wanted to try and collate information from a variety of open sources to act as a living version of this which allows for exploring some of the rich data that is nowadays available. I still think there is something I would like to do in this area but it has fallen off my list. It's definitely more of a long-term aim and you can see how the other projects kind of sit around it.