Swartland Renosterveld NPC

Welcome to Swartland Renosterveld NPC

Swartland Renosterveld NPC is a young and energetic non-profit that is dedicated to protecting and conserving the Critically Endangered Renosterveld Flora of the Swartland.

The Swartland is one of the world’s “Hottest” Hotspots for Threatened Red List Plants!

The Swartland is a “Top Priority” region for the conservation of floristic diversity. The conservation value of Swartland Renosterveld is extremely high at local, provincial, national and global levels.

How did such a dire situation arise? Firstly the Swartland is a major Centre of Plant Narrow Endemism (CPNE) and secondly “fence-to-fence” land-use change and associated habitat loss has wiped out over 95 percent of the region’s natural Swartland Renosterveld vegetation.

The Swartland’s Renosterveld precious floral heritage is severely under-appreciated and is threatened with imminent extinction. Swartland Renosterveld NPC aims to change this situation and promote the recovery of the region’s precious renosterveld flora.

The Swartland Region

The Swartland actually takes its name from the region’s naturally occurring vegetation called Renosterveld. Viewed from afar, Renosterveld appears as dark swathes on the horizon and early Dutch settlers therefore called the region “Het Zwarteland”.

The Swartland’s undulating plains and rolling hills north of Cape Town have long been coveted for the development of intensive agriculture due to an abundance of fertile soil and a Mediterranean-style climate of winter rainfall and hot dry summers.

Stretching around 150 km from Het Kruis in the north to Durbanville in the south, the lowlands of the Swartland are bounded by the rugged Atlantic coastline in the west and the jagged peaks of the Groot Winterhoek Mountains in the east.

Strongly associated with wheat production, the Swartland lowlands are South Africa’s bread basket and continue to produce record-breaking crops. In the three centuries since the early Dutch settlers first plunged their ploughs into the region’s rich earth, the Swartland’s native Renosterveld has been on the retreat, being gradually supplanted by croplands, leading to an invisible but very real crisis.

Despite the dominance of wheat, the Swartland region is now receiving international acclaim for its unique terroirs and tremendous viticultural potential. The Swartland is the country’s largest wine region in terms of geographic area. However, only 12,000 hectares of the Swartland have been planted to vines, making it the world’s last great frontier for the development of high-quality viniculture, posing further risks to the region’s already endangered native renosterveld flora.

Swartland Renosterveld in Crisis

Our Floral Heritage Is In Crisis

Flora of the Swartland Renosterveld

Swartland Renosterveld is a hardy vegetation type dominated by shrubs of the daisy family, especially the Renosterbos (Elytropappus rhinocerotis), as well as grasses and bulbs. Renosterveld is well adapted to the Swartland region’s Mediterranean climate of wet winters and hot dry summers.

In the Swartland, Renosterveld is generally found on nutrient-rich soils derived from shale, granite and silcrete in lowlands of under 350 metres elevation. There are four main vegetation types in the Swartland, each based on a discrete geological substrate, namely Swartland Shale Renosterveld, Swartland Granite Renosterveld, Swartland Silcrete Renosterveld and Swartland Alluvium Fynbos.

Contrary to its scrubby appearance, Swartland Renosterveld represents one of the world’s greatest treasure troves of floral diversity and endemism.

With its unique plant families and showy Proteas, Fynbos has long been celebrated as one of the world’s greatest floral kingdoms. In sharp contrast, Renosterveld was relegated to the role of ugly stepsister and largely ignored. Ostensibly an unpalatable subject in the hallowed halls of academia, few botanists paid much attention to Renosterveld as a vegetation type. In his ground-breaking work “Veld Types of South Africa” that veritable doyen of South African ecology, J.P.H. Acocks, was instrumental in literally putting the Swartland’s vegetation on the map by formally recognizing “Coastal Rhenosterbosveld” as number 46 of his 70 veld types, albeit with the telling note that “little information is available about it”.

Swartland Renosterveld’s neglect in the early days of South African botany was perhaps due to its wholescale disappearance under the plough (it was already under threat by the 1950s) as well as its scruffy non-descript appearance, mitigated only by the short-lived blooming of its geophytic component in spring and autumn.

Fortunately, Swartland Renosterveld is now starting to gain the recognition that it deserves. One of the aims of our non-profit is to significantly elevate the profile of the Swartland’s flora, so that it can become more widely appreciated by academics and laypeople in both the domestic and international arenas.

The Swartland Hotspot of Plant Narrow Endemism

The Swartland is an under-appreciated Hotspot of Plant Narrow Endemism (HPNE) and its renosterveld vegetation is home to over one hundred Narrow Endemic Species which are found solely in the region and nowhere else on earth.

Narrow Endemic Species are inherently vulnerable to habitat loss and environmental degradation due to their limited distribution range. Thus, if the Swartland’s Narrow Endemics are not looked after in the region, they will be forever lost to humankind. Notable Swartland endemics are geophytes (bulbs) and the genus Marasmodes (Autumn-asters), most of whose members are restricted to the region.

What are Endemic Species? Plant species having relatively small geographic ranges are called narrow endemics. Endemic plants with small distribution ranges are highly susceptible to the human-induced loss of their natural habitat, given that their component populations are easily wiped out, even by the most localized of activities. On the other hand, more widely distributed species enjoy some in-built resilience given that some of their populations are likely to survive the onslaught of the ever-ongoing expansion of human activities.

Several media articles have created the problematic misconception that the Renosterbos is “endemic” to the Renosterveld. On the contrary, Renosterbos is widely distributed from southern Namibia to the Eastern Cape and is found in a wide range of veld types. The reality is that Renosterveld is home to many endemic bulbs, succulents and “bossies”. Renosterbos is a prominent and vital element of Renosterveld, but is definitely not one of the Swartland’s endemics!