Bothalia - African Biodiversity & Conservation ISSN: (Online) 2311-9284, (Print) 0006-8241 Page 1 of 5 Short Communication Determining the type locality and collector of Nylander’s South African lichens Authors: Background: In 1868, Nylander described 15 new lichen taxa from collections made near 1 Ian D. Medeiros Durban, South Africa. The locality was not specified and the collector was identified only as Affiliations: ‘Miss Armstrong’. 1Department of Biology, Duke Objectives: To identify the collector and type locality of Nylander’s species. University, United States Method: Scientific literature, maps, letters, notebooks and genealogical sources were consulted Corresponding author: Ian Medeiros, to reconstruct the provenance of the specimens.
[email protected] Results: ‘Miss Armstrong’ was likely Olivia Armstrong; she collected in the Karkloof area of Dates: the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. Received: 26 June 2018 Accepted: 06 Sept. 2018 Conclusion: This investigation facilitates future work to determine whether the species Published: 26 Feb. 2019 described and reported by Nylander are still extant in the same locality. How to cite this article: Medeiros, I.D., 2019, ‘Determining the type locality Introduction and collector of Nylander’s In 1868, Finnish taxonomist William Nylander published a short article on lichens collected from South African lichens’, Bothalia 49(1), a2384. ‘Port-Natal’ (Nylander 1868). This paper identified 84 species and infraspecific taxa, many of https://doi.org/10.4102/abc. which had not previously been reported from southern Africa and 15 of which were new to v49i1.2384 science. Most of these new species have neither been recorded since their original description nor given a modern taxonomic assessment (Table 1).