Summary
A new species of Leucas, here described as L. gypsicola A. J. Paton, Friis & Sebsebe, was collected in 2015, on gypsum outcrops of the Gorrahei Formation at the Lele Hills between Ginir and Imi, Oromia National Regional State, Ethiopia. The closest relatives of L. gypsicola are two species, which occur in the dry parts of Ethiopia and Somalia (L. abyssinica) and in the Rift Valley of Kenya (L. hirundinaris). Leucas gypsicola seems to be a narrow endemic, restricted to outcrops of gypsum dominated by the tree Commiphora guidottii in Acacia-Commiphora woodland and bushland east of the Ethiopian highlands, similar to the narrowly restricted ranges of two recently described species of Commicarpus, C. macrothamnus Friis & O. Weber and C. leleensis Friis & Sebsebe (Nyctaginaceae).
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Victoria C. Friis for her drawing of the new species in Fig. 1. Wege Abebe, staff member at the Ethiopian National Herbarium, Addis Ababa University, and Ermias Getachew, driver at the Department of Plant Biology and Biodiversity, Addis Ababa University, are thanked for their kind and excellent assistance to Ib Friis during field work in 2015. We are, as always, grateful to the Carlsberg Foundation for grants covering field work and Ib Friis’ and Sebsebe Demissew’s travels to Kew.
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Accepted for publication 24 September 2018.
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Paton, A.J., Friis, I. & Demissew, S. A new species of Leucas, L. gypsicola (Lamiaceae), from gypsum outcrops in eastern Ethiopia. Kew Bull 73, 59 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12225-018-9781-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12225-018-9781-2