African Wildlife & Environment Issue 84 2023

FAUNA, FLORA & WILDLIFE

An excellent example of how fire determines forest-fynbos boundaries is shown here in this photograph taken after a wildfire burned through the fynbos surrounding the Grootbos Forest near Stanford. Here the upper forest margin is protected by the low quartzite cliffs, and in the foreground there is a demonstration of how the first few marginal forest trees, that are non-flammable species, have prevented the fire from completely destroying this small, isolated Afromontane Forest patch

supplemented by run-off). Also, many of these species are fire resprouters and/or have evolved a thick-corky bark. Examples of these are: • Platylophus trifoliatus that occurs in forest and in riverine fringing 'forest' in the mountains • Cassine peragua where two of the three subspecies are CFR endemics, with subsp. peragua extending north to the Soutpanberg (our northern most sandstone mountain area). All of these entities are forest or scrub-forest species • Cassine schinoides (= Hartogiella schinoides ) that is both a forest and scrub-forest/rocky-outcrop small tree. • Cunonia capensis which is a more widely spread forest species, but confined to South Africa.

Afromontane Forest trees are mostly fire sensitive, so the forests generally occur in fire-shadows, and require ~1,000 mm annual precipitation (in places where this is less precipitation the local habitat is supplemented by ground-water). As such these forest patches, and outliers, would most certainly have been more continuous over geological time – but only when lower sea-levels and warmer-wetter climates would have enabled a more connected linkage along the more fertile lowlands (off the mountains). It is not, therefore, too surprising that there are only a few CFR Afromontane Forest endemics that evolved over the period of geological isolation, and unsurprisingly some of them are also common Scrub-forest/Rocky outcrops species on the quartzite mountains (where additional nutrients and water are

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