Botanists decode secret life of rare plants to ensure reintroduction success

Botanists decode secret life of rare plants to ensure reintroduction success

It was 2006 and Ismail Ebrahim, a botanist with the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI), was worried. While surveying one of the last remaining patches of renosterveld shrubland in South Africa’s Paarl region, near Cape Town, he and his team of citizen scientists found a small, yellow-flowered daisy species: Marasmodes undulata. It had long been thought extinct, with the last 200-strong population observed at the same location …