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Sunday 21 May 2017

State of the worlds plants 2016

Kew have finally spunked out their review of the worlds flora 2016 with a few good surprises for everyone.  It includes more wild varieties of Manioc and a new highly localised Parsnip from Turkey, as well as some re classifications through genetic analysis , which includes Paubrasilia a national tree of Brazil which has been hived off from Caesalpina.  I like the Mail's take on this which links some new species of Aloe from *South Africa which aren't in the report at all.  (Thankfully there are new species of Aloe being found but its normally either Kenya or Madagascar which are the hotspot areas).

The top news is that news of this was actually a few months old, as a preliminary list of this appeared up on Kew's Science blog back in February but we'll ignore that as there's a shiny new website complete with PDF download of the entire report here.

A lot of this makes sobering reading as most are threatened and critically endangered, largely due to habitat loss, either dam projects or mining concerns a lot of species hang in the balance here.

Anyway that is the state of the worlds plants.

*Brain cells, The Aloe species come from the front page of the pdf where it looks like the Mail has copy pasted extensively from.  Incidentally been trawling through last years back issues of the BCSS journal looking for any sign of these new Aloes and can only find mentions from Yemen and Kenya rather then South Africa.  Although I can remember an article in Bradleya our year book of them being cliff dwellers of some sort, I cannot remember what year it is could well be from 2016 and of course I don't actually have that years Bradleya.

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