Rhynchotechum nirijuliense

Rhynchotechum nirijuliense Taram & D.Borah, Gardens’ Bulletin Singapore 72(1): 125–129. 2020;
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Rhynchotechum nirijuliense : 2 posts by 2 authors. Attachments (2) – 290 kb and 2 mb.

Rhynchotechum nirijuliense (Gesneriaceae), a new species from Northeast India.pdf
Rhynchotechum nirijuliense (5).jpg

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Posted on Facebook, by one of our members as below:
The 2nd species that got published today is Rhynchotechum nirijuliense from Nirijuli Hills of Arunachal Pradesh.
Story: It was the year 2016. I and Miss Momang were student of Master’s and were very curious about each plant we see, though rarely knew the name of any. We regularly took trips to the nearest jungle of Nirijuli. Among the many plants, a shrub with pink flowers borne in the axils of leaves repeatedly took our notice for a year, but we never hardly tried to identif…y. God knows, what we were exactly in search of!
Later the next year we came to know, that the plants were a species of Rhynchotechum and collected all the different ones present there, and extended our search to find the other ones distributed in our region. On a detailed study we could so far collect R. ellipticum, R. vestitum, R. alternifolium R. parviflorum and the interesting one from Nirjuli which doesn’t fits to any known species so far. On communication with Benjamin Anderson and David Middleton who revised the genus, it was confirmed to be new. And got lucky to describe it with the gigantic help from Benjamin who repeatedly revised my manuscript before publication for almost 15 times.
Rhynchotechum is a very complex genus and needs careful eyes for species delimitation, as all the species look superficially similar. But the fruits preserves some good identification details.
R. nirijuliense is named after the Nirijuli Hills, the pockets of which still preserves some beautiful plants, but the new settlements have threatened the survival of many. You can see this species there and adjoining areas of Papum Pare district. We hope you enjoyed the reading.

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References:
Novataxa  Rhynchotechum nirijuliense (Gesneriaceae), a new species from Northeast India– Taram & D.Borah- Gardens’ Bulletin Singapore 72(1): 125–129. 2020 (Abstract- A new species of Rhynchotechum (Gesneriaceae), Rhynchotechum nirijuliense Taram & D.Borah, is described from Nirijuli of Papum Pare district in Arunachal Pradesh, Northeast India. The new species is compared to Rhynchotechum ellipticum and R. calycinum. A detailed description, colour photographs and notes on the distribution and ecology of the new species are provided)