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Figure 2 . Sampling a wetland near Chrissiesmeer on the Mpumalanga Highveld , South Africa ( Photo credit : Erwin Sieben )
When the funding became available , it led to a few of the busiest field seasons that we have experienced during our careers , and every free week that we could find was spent on touring the country , visiting wetlands , and taking vegetation samples . In the summer of 2010 / 2011 , Erwin Sieben left the Free State , where he was working at the time , to travel the Western Cape before the December holidays , meeting with several fellow wetland ecologists , travelled up the coast towards the East , took a short holiday somewhere along the coast for the Christmas holidays , and then went on to Durban in early January to pick up a student with whom he would then sample the wetlands of the Wild Coast , just south of Durban . These and many other memorable field trips led to a large number of plant collections that required identification and soil samples that needed to be dried and sent out for analysis in the laboratory of the Agricultural Research Council in Pretoria . By now , we sampled only a single soil plot per wetland , unlike previous studies where soil samples were taken in every vegetation plot of the wetland .
The previously mentioned Wild Coast area in the Eastern Cape formed one of the most interesting and most inaccessible areas to visit , and there were certainly some botanical treasures to be found there . Generally , the wetlands that were found in nutrient-poor substrates such as those on quartzites or in peat on coastal sands proved to be the richest in species and among the most interesting wetlands in terms of species composition . Another area that was very rich in species was the Maloti-Drakensberg area , but this had already been extensively visited during the surveys that were done for the Maloti-Drakensberg Transfrontier Park in 2006 , and the standard sampling protocol developed in 2009 was not yet applied there .
For this reason , the study that is now published in the Journal of Vegetation Science would not have been possible without the contribution of vegetation plots in Lesotho , which represents the upper reaches of the biggest rivers in South Africa , but is politically an independent nation . So when Peter Chatanga eventually joined Erwin ’ s research team in 2017 to survey wetlands in Lesotho , we could finally sample vegetation plots in the mountainous regions with the standard sampling protocol and including soil samples . The plots in Lesotho made the environmental gradient from low to high altitude wetlands complete , and therefore the inclusion of plots from this country made for a narrative that makes ecological sense . Ecologically speaking , South Africa , Lesotho , and Eswatini ( formerly Swaziland ) should be regarded as one region , as they share river catchments , geological units , and climatic zones , and it is clear that political borders are quite arbitrary when it comes to understanding the large-scale ecology of a region . Eswatini has not been included in this study , but that is not a serious problem as similar altitudes and climatic zones have been sampled extensively in neighbouring South Africa , whereas Lesotho represents a unique climatic zone .
This Behind the paper post refers to the article Components of plant species diversity along environmental gradients at various spatial scales in wetland environments of southern Africa by Erwin Sieben et al . ( 2021 ), published in the Journal of Vegetation Science (
https :// doi . org / 10.1111 / jvs . 13097 ).
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