The video shows the area when the fire was burning near Rhodes Memorial. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sXpWq5x5L4
The fire has got worse since this was taken - but my interest is in the amazing Lichens that I found under the pine trees above UCT.
I have recorded some on iSpot but wondering if they may be lost forever.
Does anyone know how long Lichens take to recover after fire?
The pines were alien so they won’t be encouraged to grow again.
Derek I think you’d like to follow the Google man from Rhodes Memorial - some lovely trails up the mountain. But looking at the Restaurant one can see what happened - it was a thatch building surrounded by pines.
Dont know how fast the lichens would come back at this location but of course they are the first colonisers of some bare areas. Would be interesting to look at some of the areas of California in this respect as there have been large areas burnt there in recent years. Some of the lichens in high rainfall, less polluted areas grow quite fast.
I thought you might be interested in this fire. I suspect it started with a Berg Wind which blows from the north. This morning the wind has changed to a strong South Easter and the fire is threatening homes. Tricky for fire crews.
The lichens were probably protected by the old pines - see the yellow man’s route.
They will probably be felled now. Wondering if this might go back to forest, like the area above Kirstenbosch, but it will take years and the climate is changing fast - we’ll need to wait and see.
After the fire of 2000, one wonders what could happen. But the wind turned and it looks as if the fire is under control at the moment.
I haven’t checked today.
Then, thinking that the moisture from the Table Cloth could well support the diverse plant-life on Table Mountain.
The South East cloud appears in summer when everything is dry.
This would be the only moisture the lichens would get - much like the mists that we get along the Cape West Coast, that sustain the lichen colonies there.
I suspect that, even without the media obsession with Covid, Breixit, and a royal death, this would still have barely registered on the UK news radar. But the effect of these fires can be long-lasting. Although they are a natural phenomenon, human shaping of landscape and climate have often tended to make their impact more severe. And global warming/alien species introduction means that the recolonised areas may look very different when they do recover.
Just before lock-down, a You-Tuber I follow was in New Zealand, and the smoke from Australian bush fires (well over 4,000 km away) was creating a high-level haze over the islands. A sobering thought, but how many Brits even remember that there were such fires?
Well. it’s egged me on to add more lichen pics from the two days I spent there - it seems that Saffers prefer easy options.
There have been a few northern Hemisphere lichenologists who have done some work.
I don’t think that I had my Dobson LICHENS when I first tried to find names.
Have you seen the Lichen pics I took on a crazy trip into Namaqualand. They were amazing and I could get some names from the SWA guide.
