During the last 15 years I have mostly been working in Bolivia and currently manage a Darwin Initiative Project funded through the British government looking at conservation priorities in Eastern Bolivia. There are a lot of different native plants in Bolivia, some 15,000 by most counts, that is about ten times as many as in all the British Isles. There are two areas where the plants are particularly numerous, the Andes and the eastern lowland plains next to Brazil. There is such a diversity of plants that both areas are regarded as world hotspots of plant diversity and both, of course, extend into neighbouring countries.
Most people think of central South America as one great plain covered in forest. Yes, it is mostly flat and it does have, or at least had, a lot of forest. However much of it is actually grass-covered plain with scattered bushes and trees, a bit like an African savannah but without the lions. In this region, rains fall for only about four months a year and the area becomes bone dry in the winter season. Fires break out every year and sweep across the plains. It is only after fire and a bit of help from the rain, of course, that you really appreciate how many plants there are, as everything bursts into flower.
And it is only relatively flat. Steep-sided isolated mountains rise out of the plains, like little lost worlds – actually the original “Lost World” of the book and the film was based on one of these mountains in Bolivia. And they are still mostly unexplored and new plants can be found quite easily, and, just as in the fictional “Lost World”, these mountain islands are home to unique plants described by botanists as “endemics”, a term used to describe plants known nowhere else in the world. These mountains are the true hotspots for diversity compared with which the plains and lowland forests are decidedly cool.
In the picture above you can see one of the rock towers you find on the flat tops of these mountains. This particular one is honey-combed with crevices, which is home for some aggressive hornets, whose victim I have been several times. It is also home to half a dozen plants known from nowhere else in the world except for a few similar rocks in the vicinity. This must make this place one of the hottest points of one of the hottest mountains for plant diversity in the eastern lowlands of Bolivia. I have added pictures of one of the new plants we found here. In one you can see how it grows naturally and in the other you can see the details of its flower.
Its scientific name Blepharadon crabrorum, which refers precisely to those hornets that stung my companions when we first found it. These same rocks have at least two more species new to science.
With the help of generous funding from the InterContinental Hotels Group, scientists from the Department of Plant Sciences at Oxford will be able to continue exploring hotspots like these in collaboration with Bolivian colleagues.
