Sedges, Cyperacese, are Monocotyledonous Plants resembling and closely related to Grasses, but differing in having leaves with a triangular rather than a flat cross section which are arranged spirally in three ranks, unlike those of grasses which are aranged in two ranks alternately. Most Sedges are found in wetlands, but they occur in all environments. The Water Chestnut, Eleocharis dulcis, and Papyrus, Cyperus papyrus, are Sedges.
In a paper published in the journal Phytotaxa on 4 November 2016, Hu-Biao Yang of the Tropical Crops Genetic Resources Institute of the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences, Xiao-Xia Li of the Environment and Plant Protection Institute of the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences, and Chang-Jun Bai, Wen-Qiang Wang and Guo-Dao Lui, also of the ropical Crops Genetic Resources Institute of the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences, describe a new species of Sedge from the Wuzhi Shan Nature Reserve in Wuzhi Shan County on Hainan Island in South China.
The new species is placed in the widespread and specious genus Carex and given the specific name concava, in reference to the nutlets (seeds) of the plant, which are concave at the base. Carex concava is a herbaceous plant with leaves reaching 75 cm in length and a centimeter in width. Flowers are green and borne on peduncles up to 15 cm in legth from March onwards, with nutlets produced from April. It was found growing in the understory of a tropical rainforest in mountains at 1200-1500 m above sealevel.
Carex concava. (A) Inflorescence. (B) Habit. Scale bar in (A) is 1 cm. Hu-Biao Yang in Yang & Li et al. (2016).
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