RESTORE NATURE NEWSLETTER

The new project was welcomed with great enthusiasm

Biodiversity: Casabio launch Kirstenbosch

September 2024

On the 30th of August at our National Botanical Garden, Kirstenbosch, a new force was born on the Fynbos conservation scene. Well actually its about education, research and conservation. It is called Casabio. Click the link below to go to my article which has much more detail on what this was all about.

biodiversity-project-Casabio.html

David Gwynne-Evans the botanist is the force behind the force. He and the other team members who make up its core are deeply concerned about biodiversity loss in this precious and exceptionally diverse Fynbos biome and set out to do something about it, hatching plans decades ago which have now come to fruition.

David and some of his hard working crew

The weapons they they are using in the battle against extinction are cutting edge, including the very latest new digital tools and artificial intelligence. At least half the team are software engineers. They are supported by some very big guns like the Council for Scientific Research and Kirstenbosch itself. The platform will be open access and fed by citizen science, that is the likes of you and me contributing snaps with our smart phones.

The online platform with its system of apps will bring together a multiplicity of botany related forms of information, from identification and observation, to the oldest records in botanical archives. They will be digitizing all our plant identification books and botanical writing and photographing our herbarium specimens for the record. They are developing a number of projects which involve monitoring plant communities and landscapes. This will make it possible to better calculate the effects of climate change and biodiversity loss, the benefits of road reserves, which are one of their development projects and many other dynamics, and it should make effective interventions easier to spot. For more details and links please go to my article on the launch here.

biodiversity-project-Casabio.html

It is a most welcome development, as despite living on top of a globally important diversity hotspot we fall behind well resourced countries in terms of knowledge and recording of our plants.

David and the members of Casabio, their friends and contributors from Kirstenbosch and the botanical fraternity put on a great show. There were numerous plant gifts, botanical and biodiversity awards and art made by David exposing flowers to fabulous spectral colours. We were entertained by Mark Sampson the comedian and a spectacular light show.

The light show was so much better than this. The whirling lights made beautiful patterns my cell phone didn't capture. I don't know how it works but its absolutely magical.

It is wonderful that we have a data gathering platform on plant observations created by Africans for Africans, as relying on global entities takes too much focus off our critically endangered local heritage.

David also announced that he and his girlfriend are about to set off on a trip around Africa to make botanical recordings on amongst others Mount Kilimanjaro. They will probably be doing a lot of networking and bringing others on board during the trip. This is extremely exciting.

There were a number of fascinating slide shows at the launch, one by botanist colleague Adam Harrower on the strange arty looking succulents of the Tankwa karoo and another on the reintroduction into the wild of the gorgeous lost plant, Erica verticilliata by Dalton Gibbs and others.

David was kind enough to present his one time mentor, my mother Pixie Littlewort, who is now 94, with a charming fun forest-pixie award. My mom spent a lot of time teaching him about the forest decades ago when he was much younger. She tried to save bark stripped trees in Newlands forest by painting them with tree seal, and raised local Newlands forest indigenous tree varieties from seed at Mount Pleasant for replanting gaps in the forest where oaks had taken down the canopy. I accepted the award on my mother's behalf and mom was really gratified to be remembered by David and others.

Non plant lovers would have been pleasantly surprised that the launch of a botany platform could be so exciting, and I look forward to where this is going to go.

You can get involved by visiting the Casabio website and perhaps downloading the observation apps to start off.

casabio website

Accepting my mom's forest award from the botanist.

Topic suggestions welcome

You may write to me anytime at the website greenidiom by filling out a comment. You can also use my webmail (website mail) address greenidi@greenidiom.com.

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