יומן של Schoenus in southern Africa

Big strides have been made in the last couple of years in finding some of the southern African Schoenus species with relatively few observations. It was especially exciting to see observations of S. filiculmis, S. rigidus, S. aureus and what I think is S. adnatus when reviewing the almost 600 observations uploaded to the project.

If you are heading east of Knysna, keep your eyes out for the large S. loreus, with its flat leaves. Schoenus limosus is also large and tends to occur in muddy locations in eastern South Africa.

I am really surprised that we have yet to see any S. lucidus. It is quite a robust former Epischoenus species that one can find up in the mountains of the Worcester and Ceres regions.

I admit that there could have been some S. brunnescens observations already submitted, but this is a species that stands out more in the field than it does in on a herbarium sheet or perhaps even an image. It seems to be closely related to S. compactus and S. crassus, but has much shorter spikelets.

I know that some of you have had your eyes out for S. calceolus in the limestone areas of the Overberg. This species is more like S. bolusii than S. cuspidatus/S. crassus. It is small, with short spikelets and can have a unique flattened base.

The lack of observations of S. triticoides and S. riparius does not surprise me. These are species with very narrow known ranges. Schoenus triticoides is a very unique species in the Schoenus compar - S. pictus group, whereas S. riparius seems to be a more robust version of S. cuspidatus. I sometimes wonder if the collections of S. riparius were only autopolyploids of S. cuspidatus.

Over the last few years, I have been compiling clear, illustrative images of key traits of southern African Schoenus species to use in Wikipedia and Wikispecies pages. This has allowed me to give a more detailed description of each species for future reference. Recently, I have been opting to include images that already have their permissions set to CC BY-SA 4.0 so that I don't have to ask people to change their permissions for me to use their images.

As one can imagine, this has created a situation where species with many observations on iNaturalist have lots of detailed images on their webpages, while less observed species are lacking images.

The following is an update of additional images that I am looking for to improve webpages:

The next group of species already have images uploaded to their webpages, but these could be improved for illustrative purposes: