Talk:Harrington s.n., Stellenbosch (1970)
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Discussion for: Harrington s.n., Stellenbosch (1970) • View • Links • Related changes
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Discussion
Evidentiary scope
The Compton catalogue entry gives the habitat as Mountain slope. Roadside. and describes the plant as Weed (a weed), at a farm on the Somerset West Road at Stellenbosch on 5 March 1970. Pretoria's entry for the same gathering gives no habitat and no description. The plant grew outside cultivation. The accession is classified Feral, by inference from the catalogue; the catalogue does not say whether the plants descended from a crop. A single gathering does not establish a continuing population, and no conservation priority is assigned.
The Botanical Database of Southern Africa publishes no image of this sheet. Its image count is zero, and so is the image count of all 1,361,966 rows in the database: the store is empty, and SANBI's own site still lists plant images among its plans. The accession carries no image until the herbarium supplies a scan.
Georeferencing
The coordinate is the centre of a quarter-degree square, not a field fix. BODATSA records the accuracy as 1/4dg and stores the square's code alongside it; a quarter-degree square is about 27 km across. Of the 61 georeferenced Cannabis rows in BODATSA, all 41 flagged 1/4dg fall exactly on a square's centre and none of the other 20 does. The point is carried at the precision the database gives it, with the accuracy stated here. BODATSA's LatLongChecked field is null on every Cannabis row, so no Cannabis coordinate in BODATSA has been verified by the herbarium.
The square is 3318DD.
Editorial treatment
The accession is filed at the Compton Herbarium rather than at Pretoria because the Compton entry is the fuller of the two: it carries a habitat, a plant description and a determiner, and Pretoria's carries none of them. Pretoria's collector-number field holds PRE 52601, a herbarium accession number rather than a collector's number; the Compton entry records the gathering correctly as s.n., and the accession follows it.
BODATSA publishes no per-specimen page, so the accession cites the database and the barcode identifies the sheet.
Source discrepancies
The two catalogues agree on the date, the collector and the coordinate, and differ in how much of the sheet they transcribe. Neither contradicts the other.
Source citations remain in the article. Éloise 07:17, 24 September 2026 (+07)