Finally, six months after returning from South Africa, I am starting to process the photos I took while I was there. It will take me awhile to finish all of them. I've only posted ones from the first two days of fieldwork. That leaves about 25 days of photos to go. But if you're interested in seeing them, I'll be putting them all on Flickr. Just head over there for the South Africa 2012 collection. More sets will be added over the next week or two.¹

To attract pollinators, of course. But this video illustrates the results of an elegant experiment that illustrates the point very nicely.



Hat tip: Michael Whitehead (@DrSway)

I've been back in the States since last Thursday night, and I finally had time to collect my #dimensionsZA tweets into a storify post. Here it is. The bit.ly links return to blog posts from here that were tweeted. All of the photos (except for the one of The Crack in KwaZulu Natal) were taken with my iPhone 4S. The one of the crack was shot with a Nikon D200, 3 exposures, and merged to HDR in Photoshop.

Click through for the story.

I'm sitting in the Premier Lounge at Capetown International as I write this.¹ My flight doesn't leave for another 2 1/4 hours, and I've been here for nearly 3 hours already. It's not that I'm that paranoid about getting to airports early for international flights.² It's that Jane and the rest of the Protea team had to get to De Hoop tonight. They had hoped to drop me off a couple of hours earlier, but their errands in town took a bit longer than planned.

This has been a very successful trip. Thanks to Jane's careful planning, data from the Protea Atlas Project, and advice from Tony Rebelo, we collected every species of Protea we were hoping to, except for P. simplex and P. lorea. We sampled between 50 and 60 species of Protea throughout South Africa, with 2-5 populations of some of the widespread ones - not counting the 19 populations of Protea repens we have in the garden at Kirstenbosch.

In addition, data we just took in Kleinmond³ involved trait measurements and DNA sampling of 88 individuals (white and pink morphs of Protea longifolia, pink Protea compacta, and white Protea repens) and detailed physiological measurements (photosynthetic rate, chlorophyll fluorescence, mid-day water potential) on a subset of 47. The physiological measurements are a repeat of those Jane and the crew made a month ago before I arrived. And they'll make the same set of duplicate measurements in De Hoop, having made the first set in early June. All in all, a very successful trip.

And that's just the Protea part of the work.

Cindi's and Carl's teams are collecting and measuring Pelargonium, and John's team is collecting community data, first in the vicinity of the Kogelberg, now in the Cederberg.

While doing fieldwork this year, we were able to attend the annual Fynbos Forum,

an affiliation of researchers, planners, managers, landowners and a range of other stakeholders that meets annually to discuss management issues and research results, and to formulate priorities for future research and conservation management actions required to ensure the conservation and sustainability of fynbos ecosystems.

My presentation at the Forum is embedded above. I was delighted to meet Frank Schurr, Byron Lamont, Nicky Allsop, Karen Esler, and many others. I also hope that I'll be able to return to future Forums. It is a very interesting and valuable project.

#dimensionsZA is the hashtag I'll be using for posts I make to Twitter while I'm in South Africa for fieldwork on our Dimensions of Biodiversity project. My plane leaves Bradley this afternoon, and after stops in Philadelphia and Amsterdam, I'll arrive in Johannesburg Monday night (Monday afternoon East Coast time). One post-doc will be traveling with me, and we'll meet another post-doc, her husband, and her brother when we arrive. We'll spend a couple of weeks in Mpalunga and Kwa-Zulu Natal collecting both Protea and Pelargonium before moving to Capetown for work in the experimental gardens, participation in the annual Fynbos Forum (in Cape St. Elizabeth this year), and work in the Kogelberg and De Hoop.¹ I'll try to make a few blog posts while I'm there, but Internet access is liable to be a bit spotty, and even when it's not, I'll be spending nearly all of my computer time updating spreadsheets with data.

So if you want to see what the Protea team is up to while I'm in the field, you can either follow me on Twitter (@keholsinger) or follow the #dimensionsZA hashtag.

Our work isn't organized the same way as it was last year. Last year we had a community team based in Baviaanskloof, and the Protea and Pelargonium teams traveled and worked together the whole time we were in the field. This year the ecology team is sampling community diversity at several different sites in the western Cape, the Protea team is collecting both Protea and Pelargonium in Mpalunga and Kwa-Zulu Natal as well as collecting detailed trait data on some species we've studied before in the Kogelberg and De Hoop.

There will be two different Pelargonium teams. One will collect detailed trait data similar to what we'll be collecting in the Kogelberg and De Hoop. Late in July, we'll overlap with them for a few days in Kogelberg. The other team will be traveling through parts of the Western Cape and Northern Cape collecting species of Pelargonium that they weren't able to collect last year. Another Pelargonium team will return in late October and early November to collect taxa in the Eastern Cape, and one of the post-docs will stay in South Africa until then collecting additional data from the populations targeted for detailed trait measurements this July and August.²

Related articles

• Four Ways to Participate in National Pollinator Week (treehugger.com)
• Pollinator Week Is June 18 - 24 2012 Ion Exchange, Inc. Purchase Your Pollinator Seed Mix Now (nativewildflowers.wordpress.com)
• National Pollinator Week Encourages Everyone to "Bee" Good to Pollinators (hopestar.com)

I've mentioned before the Dimensions of Biodiversity project in which I am involved, Parallel radiations in Protea and Pelargonium. We'll be heading off again in mid-late June for our second season of field work. While the Pelargonium group and the community ecology group will continue to focus their work on sites in the western Cape and the karoo, the Protea group will probably spend a couple of weeks in Mpalunga and KwaZulu-Natal filling in some of the "non-Cape" species we wouldn't otherwise be able to collect. Stay tuned for updates as they develop.

In the meantime, the National Science Foundation just released a new Abstract Book with brief descriptions (and stunning photographs) for all of the projects funded so far. You can download it from the NSF website at http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2012/nsf12053/nsf12053.pdf.

When you do, you'll find descriptions of projects ranging from the microbiota of amphibian skin to functional and taxonomic diversity in freshwater plankton to speces, trait, and genetic diversity of ants to energy metabolism, carbon fixation, and colonization of deep-sea vents to ecosystem function and plant-microbe symbioses to functional, genetic, and taxonomic diversity of plant-fungal interactions to the microbiota of bee guts to our very own Protea and Pelargonium project. Enjoy!