South Africa boasts a remarkable diversity of plant life, with approximately 10% of the world's flowering species found within its borders. The country can be divided into seven biomes, or ecological life zones, with distinct environmental conditions and related sets of plant and animal life: Nama Karoo, succulent Karoo, fynbos, forest, thicket, savanna, and grassland.
There are five major habitat types in South Africa: fynbos, forest, Karoo, grassland, and savannah. Whichever classification is used, some 10% of the world’s flowering species are found in South Africa, the only country in the world with an entire plant kingdom inside its borders: the Cape Floristic Kingdom, which contains 8 600 species, 68% of them endemic.
Cape Floristic Region
This southwestern area of South Africa is the home of the fynbos, which is composed of ericas (heathers), proteas and the grass-like restios. Most spectacular in flower are the proteas, which include the king protea - the national flower - and others of broadly similar shape, the pincushion leucospermum types and spiky leucadendrons.
The colour range is vast. The ericas, the largest genus of flowering plants in South Africa, are more delicate, repaying close examination of their almost infinite variety of colour and form. These share their Cape home with such beauties as the red disa orchid, one of South Africa’s 550 wild orchids, which grows in the mountains, as well as numerous irises, pelargoniums and many more.
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South Africa’s pelargoniums, in particular, have contributed greatly to gardens all over the world, as have the arum lilies - the classic white species is from this area, the yellow and pink from elsewhere in the country. The world’s gardens also have South Africa to thank for the agapanthus, gladiolus, Barberton daisy and Gardenia thunbergia, to name a few.
The Cape in the spring is a breathtaking sight, but even more astonishing is Namaqualand. Dry, rocky and desert-like for the rest of the year, it yields its floral wealth for a short few weeks in the spring in dazzling sheets of colour. The golden yellow and orange Namaqualand daisies are predominant, but in between them are a wide variety of flowers, including the iridescent succulent mesembryanthemums.
Colours here are particularly intense, although there is also much fascination in less colourful species such as the quiver tree (the San, or Bushmen, used to make quivers from its fibrous stem) and the bizarre-looking tall succulent known as the halfmens (half human).
Although South Africa has more than a thousand indigenous trees, large species are relatively scarce in many parts of the country. It is also in the north that one finds the famous thick-stemmed baobab, which according to African myth was accidentally planted upside down, accounting for the odd shape of its branches.
Then there are the forests of KwaZulu-Natal, where the beautiful shade-loving orange Clivia miniata, a now much cultivated member of the amaryllis family, is found. Another popular orange (and purple) garden flower, now the emblem of the US city of Los Angeles, originates in the Eastern Cape: the strelitzia.
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In much the same color range, South Africa’s winters are marked by the flowering of some of the country’s 140 species of aloes. There is virtually no area of South Africa without its particular floral treasure or species of special beauty or interest.
These include succulents that look almost exactly like stones (lithops), mangroves, tree ferns, traditional food plants and those that would kill you if you took a bite, and - one of the most promising fields of study in South Africa - a large number of plants of medicinal value.
Some of these, such as the Aloe ferox, a purgative, were discovered to be medicinally useful by the early European colonists; many more have long been known and used by indigenous African people.
Yet for all the spectacular plants to be found, perhaps the landscape that most eloquently conjures up the spirit of South African flora is the typical savannah, with its (often dry) grasses and more-or-less thickly scattered shrubs and thorn trees.
South Africa’s bushveld and savannah regions are still home to large numbers of the mammals universally associated with Africa. The Kruger National Park alone has well over 10 000 elephants and 20 000 buffaloes - in 1920 there were an estimated 120 elephants left in the whole of South Africa.
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The white rhino has also been brought back from the brink of extinction and now flourishes both in the Kruger National Park and the Hluhluwe Umfolozi Park in KwaZulu-Natal. Attention now is on protecting the black rhino.
Both these parks are home to all of the Big Five, as are other major reserves in South Africa such as Pilanesberg in North West province and numerous smaller reserves and private game lodges.
Other quintessentially African large animals are the hippo, giraffe, kudu, wildebeest (the famous gnu) and zebra, all frequently seen in South Africa’s conservation areas.
Heightened awareness, however, has created an increased appreciation of lesser known animals. A sighting of the rare tsessebe (a relative of the wildebeest) may cause as much excitement as the sight of a pride of lion.
And while one can hardly miss a nearby elephant, spotting the shy little forest-dwelling suni (Livingstone’s antelope) is cause for self-congratulation. On the really small scale, one could tackle the challenge of ticking off each of South Africa’s seven species of elephant shrew - a task that would take one all over the country and, probably, a long time to accomplish.
With well over 200 species, a short survey of South Africa’s indigenous mammals is a contradiction in terms. A few examples will help to indicate the range. In terms of appeal, primates rate highly.
In South Africa they include the nocturnal bushbabies, vervet and samango monkeys, and chacma baboons which - encouraged by irresponsible feeding and under pressure through loss of habitat - have become unpopular as raiders of homes on the Cape Peninsula.
Dassies (hyraxes, residents of rocky habitats) and meerkats (suricates, familiar from their alert upright stance) have tremendous charm, although the dassie can be an agricultural problem. The secretive nocturnal aardvark (which eats ants and is the only member of the order Tubulidentata) and the aardwolf (which eats termites and is related to the hyaena) are two more appealing creatures, and both are found over virtually the whole country.
And for those who like their terrestrial mammals damp, there is the widely distributed Cape clawless otter, which swims in both fresh and sea water. The spotted-necked otter has a more limited territory. Both are rare, however, and difficult to spot.
One mammal whose charm is recently acquired is the wild dog or Cape hunting dog, one of Africa’s most endangered mammals. Once erroneously reviled as indiscriminate killers but now appreciated both for their ecological value and their remarkably caring family behaviour, wild dog packs require vast territories.
They are found in small numbers in the Kruger National Park and environs, northern KwaZulu-Natal (including the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Park), the Kalahari, and the Madikwe reserve in North West province. More common canine carnivores are the hyaena, jackal and bat-eared fox.
Feline carnivores - besides the big cats mentioned above - include the caracal with its characteristic tufted ears, the African wild cat and the rare black-footed cat. Other flesh eaters include the civet, genet and several kinds of mongoose.
Of the 850 or so species that have been recorded in South Africa, about 725 are resident or annual visitors, and about 50 of these are endemic or near-endemic. Apart from the resident birds, South Africa hosts a number of intra-African migrants such as cuckoos and kingfishers, as well as birds from the Arctic, Europe, Central Asia, China and Antarctica during the year.
South Africa’s birdlife ranges from the ostrich - farmed in the Oudtshoorn district of the Western Cape, but seen in the wild mostly in the north of the country - through such striking species as the hornbills to the ubiquitous LBJs (“Little Brown Jobs”).
Birdwatching in Kruger National Park in the lap of luxury
A birder need not move out of a typical Johannesburg garden to spot grey loeries, mousebirds, hoopoes, hadeda ibises, crested and black-collared barbets, Cape whiteyes, olive thrushes … or a lone Burchell’s coucal poking clumsily around a tree. And that would by no means complete the list.
Among the most spectacular birds of South Africa are the cranes, most easily spotted in wetlands - although the wattled crane is a lucky find as it is extremely uncommon. The beautiful blue crane is South Africa’s national bird, while the crowned crane is probably the flashiest of the three with its unmistakable prominent crest. Among its larger bird species, South Africa also has several eagles and vultures.
The vegetation of calcareous coastal dunes of Holocene age along the south coast of South Africa’s Cape Floristic Region is poorly described. This vegetation comprises a mosaic of communities associated with two biomes, Fynbos and Subtropical Thicket.
Previously, expert knowledge rather than quantitative floristic analysis has been used to identify and delimit vegetation units. In many areas, mapped units conflate vegetation on Holocene sand with that on unconsolidated sediments of late Pleistocene age, despite pronounced species turnover across this edaphic boundary.
Despite dominance by Cape lineages and fynbos vegetation, dune vegetation in the eastern part of the region has been included in the Subtropical Thicket Biome rather than the Fynbos Biome.
The high levels of local plant endemism associated with this dune vegetation and the small and fragmented configuration of these habitats, makes it an urgent conservation priority especially when placed in the context of rising sea levels, increasing development pressures and numerous other threats.
Coastal regions are the most densely populated areas on Earth (Small & Nicholls, 2003), with human pressure on coastal environments increasing drastically in recent decades (Williams et al., 2022). This surge in human activities-urbanization, agriculture, forestry, industry, transport, and tourism-has resulted in a decline in the extent and quality of coastal dune habitats (Martínez, Psuty & Lubke, 2008).
In addition to coastal development, the predicted upsurge in extreme climatic events and sea-level rise due to climate change further exacerbate the challenges faced by coastal dunes, causing increased fragmentation and loss of habitats (Feagin, Sherman & Grant, 2005).
Coastal Dune Vegetation
The composition of fixed coastal dune vegetation of the Cape south coast and elsewhere is influenced by several geographical contingencies, namely dune area and topography (Tinley, 1985; Cowling, 1984), composition and ecology of hinterland vegetation (Laliberté, Zemunik & Turner, 2014; Grobler & Cowling, 2021), sediment age (Thwaites & Cowling, 1988; Laliberté, Zemunik & Turner, 2014) and the extent of available space for accommodating dune habitat on land exposed during glacial periods (Grobler et al., 2020).
The delimitation of vegetation units on coastal dunes on the Cape south coast is ripe for re-analysis. The current vegetation map (Rebelo et al., 2006; Grobler et al., 2018) is not based on formal floristic analysis and the mapped units frequently combine vegetation on Holocene dunes with that on older (Pleistocene and Neogene), more weathered and calcium-poor sands.
Producing a defensible classification of the dune vegetation is important for habitat protection, since conservation priority status in South Africa is based on the extent to which area-based targets can be or have been achieved in untransformed habitat (Rouget et al., 2006; Botts et al., 2020).
Thus, vegetation types where there is no longer sufficient intact habitat to achieve a target (say 20% of the original extent of habitat) emerge as conservation priorities, whereas those where untransformed habitat greatly exceeds the target, are regarded as “Least Threatened”.
The extent of Cenozoic sediments in the CFR is inadequately delimited (Botha, 2021). The assignment of stratigraphic units was traditionally biased towards bedrock in the compilation of geological maps in South Africa (e.g., see the 3322 Oudtshoorn sheet: Toerien, 1979).
The recent availability of remote-sensing datasets to assist mapping (Doyle & Woodroffe, 2018), a clearer understanding of onshore-offshore depositional processes influencing coastal sedimentation (e.g., Brooke et al., 2014; Grobler et al., 2020) and integrated approaches in research (Marean, Cowling & Franklin, 2020; Cowling et al., 2020; Cawthra et al., 2020b), have greatly improved our ability to map these sediments and understand their sedimentation dynamics.
The high specialization of Cape plants to the edaphic idiosyncrasies of these Cenozoic deposits (Cowling, Holmes & Rebelo, 1992) offers a hitherto neglected opportunity to use vegetation as an indicator of sediment age.
Mindful of the deficiencies in the current delimitation of the coastal dune vegetation of the CFR, our primary aim for this paper is to provide a defensible scheme and map of units based on detailed floristic analysis.
The study area extends from Cape Recife in the Eastern Cape to Cape Hangklip in the Western Cape and is nested within the Cape Floristic Region (CFR) (Fig. 1). It coincides with coastal parts of the Southeastern and Bredasdorp-Riversdale centres of endemism of the CFR.
Geologically, the area incorporates the western sector of the Algoa Group and the full extent of the Bredasdorp Group, both comprising Cenozoic coastal sediments (Fig.
Coastal dunes occupy ca. 2,200 km2 in the CFR, constituting just over 2% of the region (Grobler & Cowling, 2021). In the study area, coastal dunes cover ca. 680 km2, although only ca. 620 km2 of this comprises stable, vegetated dunes (Fig. 1).
The unconsolidated sediments of the Holocene dune landscapes comprise coarse to medium grained, freely draining sands with a high carbonate content (Tinley, 1985; Cawthra et al., 2020b). These attain thicknesses up to 100 m or more but are often shallower coastwards where the underlying geology-mostly Pleistocene aeolianites accreted on the basal bedrock-is often closer to the surface.
These deposits were laid down primarily since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) during the Postglacial Marine Transgression (Cawthra et al., 2020a). Most of the current extent of these sediments, however, is currently underwater on the continental shelf (Cawthra et al., 2020b; Grobler et al., 2020).
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