Identification of new areas for botanical inventory in Kivu,

Democratic Republic of Congo.

By:1Mwanga Mwanga Ithe, 1Wabika Dumbo,

2Kashemwa Balola, 3Franck Theeten, 3Mergen Patricia, 4Salvator Ntore, 4Steven Dessein.1Centre de Recherche en Sciences Naturelles/Lwiro (CRSN-Lwiro)

2Institut National d’Etude et de la Recherche Agronomique/Mulungu (INERA-Mulungu)

3Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) in Tervuren4Botanic Garden Meise/Belgium (BGM)

The CRSN/Lwiro and INERA/Mulungu are research centers located in South-Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo which are active in several domains such as botany, zoology, geophysical sciences, humanities sciences and agronomic sciences.

Presentation of the Lwiro and Mulungu Centers

About 25,000 specimens of plants are preserved in the herbaria of Lwiro and Mulungu and more than half of the specimens have been harvested to the Kivu.

About 6,000 specimens of plants are encoded and digitized.

Note that the digitalization in these two herbaria began only in 2011.

The software Brahms and the Herbscan scanner were used for this work.

Digitalization in Lwiro and Mulungu

Perform a gap analysis in the region to identify underexplored areas in order to orient the next inventories.

Aim of work

Kivu is located in eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The gap analysis here presented covers three provinces: North-Kivu, South-Kivu and Maniema

There are 3 National Parks, 2 big reserves and several community forests in this region.

Description of the survey area

The herbarium taxonomy methods are used in this research.

From data of BRAHMS, a selection of specimens harvested to the Kivu and preserved to Lwiro and Mulungu has been made.

All coordinates (longitude and latitude) of the Kivu has been encoded in Excel.

Methodology

The index of collecting localities of the “Flore d’Afrique Centrale (Zaïre, Rwanda, Burundi) from Bamps (1982) was used to feed the geographic coordinates into the GIS system (DivaGIS, http://www.diva-gis.org/).

Methodology (2)

Methodology (3)

An analysis on specimens previously collected in the Eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo in Kivu has been done via the collection management software Brahms (Botanical Research And Herbarium Management System (http://herbaria.plants.ox.ac.uk/bol/brahms/)

Result

Result

Areas for future botanical inventories in the Kivu have been identified.

Four areas (Kahuzi-Biega National Park in low altitude, Itombwe reserve, Virunga National Park and Maiko National Park) are selected and are good candidates for the upcoming inventories.

Result

Localities

Num

ber

of

Spec

imen

s

3Pauridiantha kahuziensis

We say Thanks