Three plants beside a mountain stream: a new Himalayan herb gets its name

On the rocky walls beside a stream near Osla village, about 2,550 metres up in Uttarakhand's Govind Pashu Vihar National Park in India, botanists from the Botanical Survey of India found a perennial herb that science had never described. They have named it Bupleurum oslaense, after the village. It stands up to 80 centimetres tall, with red-tinged upper leaves and clusters of 10 to 20 small flowers. The team of Jayanta Ghosh, Manas Bhaumik and Priyanka Bhandari confirmed it was new by analysing its DNA and checking herbarium records as far away as China and Bhutan. Only one small population is known, so the species is already classed as critically endangered, which is exactly why the naming matters: a species with a name can be watched, counted and protected.

SDG 15 · Life on land — Mechanism: tech innovation