'CONOPHYTUM CENTRAL'

摘要

A few days ago whilst writing an article with Chris Rodgerson to describe what we believe to be a new species of Conophytum I used the term 'Conophytum central' to describe the Northern Cape town of Springbok, This was used in the context that it makes a good base for exploring Namaqualand and especially for viewing Conophytum populations in habitat. After finishing that article I asked myself "is there any evidence that Springbok has a right to be called Conophytum central?"Philip Desmet and myself have for some years now collaborated on a project mapping populations of Conophytum throughout Southern Africa. This now consists of a database of approximately 2,500 separate records (some historical but mostly based on our ownobservations) covering all known taxa, complete with locality data. I should say straight away that although the database is extensive it does have some deficiencies, notably around the number of records in the south-easternmost range of this genus (e.g., C.truncatum). This is an on-going project and I have >200 records waiting to be entered into the database once I have verified their localities. However, for the purposes of simply answering the original question above the database was more than sufficient.