African Wildlife & Environment Issue 79

FAUNA, FLORA & WILDLIFE

I still struggle with the fact that so many botanically-minded people still fail to fully comprehend that plant- available nutrients are critical ecological drivers! Gardeners and horticulturalists know this full well, but somehow this knowledge is not transferred to our understanding of 'wild' plant communities. Eugene Moll Clearing up misconceptions about forests in the CAPE FLORISTIC REGION (CFR)

But more of that for another time. I must continue with the main subject of this piece, which is about forests in the CFR, where they occur now, and possibly how they once 'dominated' the region under different climatic regimes in eons gone by. Before I start, I must give readers my definition of FOREST, as this term has different connotations in different regions. For example,Wet Sclerophyll Forest in Australia is comprised of a tall Eucalyptus canopy (that can be open or even closed), with a sub-canopy tree and shrub layer, and a grassy understorey. The floristic components of this 'forest' can also occur in much more open communities with other non-forest species.Thus, for me, this Australian example is not a true forest in the South Africa sense of the concept, but rather a closed woodland!

These days one has to be wary of the word NATURAL, as we now know that almost the whole global plant landscape has been altered/managed by humans over the last 100,000 years or so. The term WILDERNESS, as first described in the USA, in fact does not exist as such, because today all terrestrial systems have been altered by humans – none are 'untrammelled'.

I do acknowledge that much of this lack of understanding of the importance of plant-available nutrients being a key ecological driver, goes back to the earliest days of botanising in 'the Cape', firstly by people from the northern hemisphere, that had their own pre-conceptions of plant geography and eventually ecology, based on their northern temperate experiences and teachings. Then these 'Western' concepts have been carried through to the present. Plant-available nutrients cannot be seen nor easily measured, but there is much literature on how critically important they are! In the 1900s the world was divided into six 'floral kingdoms' and the CAPE Kingdom (what we now know as the CFR) was the smallest and considered to be the most floristically rich of them all. Clearly the penny has yet to drop that we in the CFR are extremely special ecologically, as well as floristically!

Sideroxylon at Platbos with epiphytic mosses - green from misty weather.

My forest definition, and the one most South African botanist accept, is that our forests comprise a closed tree canopy overstorey (sometimes even with occasional emergents) with maybe two, shaded woody layers beneath the canopy and a ground layer of herbaceous plants. We have an additional constraint which is that the plant species in forests do not generally occur out in the open, and therefore

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