Summary
The incompletely known Crotalaria trifoliolata Baker f. (Leguminosae subfam. Papilionoideae) has been rediscovered in the field. For 120 years, it has been known only from a fragmentary holotype with uncertain collecting locality. The habit and height of the plant, the pods and the seeds are here described for the first time. The new information confirms that C. trifoliolata belongs to sect. Hedriocarpae Wight & Arn. subsect. Hedriocarpae. Within that subsection it is similar to a small number of other species of Crotalaria from the Somalia-Masai floristic region (C. leucoclada Baker, C. rhynchocarpa Polhill, C. saltiana Andrews, C. thomasii Harms) in having the inside of the pod densely packed with long, white hairs. C. trifoliolata was observed at the edge of and in glades inside dry Juniperus-Olea forest, in which the canopy is dominated by J. procera Endl. and the undergrowth by Barbeya oleoides Schweinf. and other species characteristic of dry Afromontane forest and bushland. The species is found only in a limited area near the eastern Ethiopian escarpment at Sheik Hussein. It is documented with images and maps, its potential distribution is modelled and a conservation assessment is provided, suggesting that C. trifoliolata is Endangered (E).
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Acknowledgements
We wish to thank the Carlsberg Foundation and the Bentham-Moxon Trust of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, for financial support of our field work in Ethiopia in 2013, our travel companions Wege Abebe, technical assistant at the Ethiopian National Herbarium, Addis Ababa University, Abubaker Atem, guide from Dinshu, and Ermias Getachew, driver at the Faculty of Science, Addis Ababa University, for excellent help and company in the field, the National Herbarium (ETH), Addis Ababa, for logistic support and Paulo van Breugel for sharing his model of Ethiopian environmental parameters with us.
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Friis, I., Weber, O. Crotalaria trifoliolata (Leguminosae: Papilionoideae), a previously incompletely known Ethiopian endemic rediscovered after 120 years. Kew Bull 69, 9536 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12225-014-9536-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12225-014-9536-7