''Vepris bali'' is a species of

plant Plants are the eukaryotes that form the Kingdom (biology), kingdom Plantae; they are predominantly Photosynthesis, photosynthetic. This means that they obtain their energy from sunlight, using chloroplasts derived from endosymbiosis with c ...

in the family

Rutaceae The Rutaceae () is a family (biology), family, commonly known as the rueRUTACEAE
in Bo ...

. It is a tree recorded from a cloud forest remnant of the Bamenda Highlands of

Cameroon Cameroon, officially the Republic of Cameroon, is a country in Central Africa. It shares boundaries with Nigeria to the west and north, Chad to the northeast, the Central African Republic to the east, and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the R ...

. It is the twentieth known species of ''

Vepris ''Vepris'' is a genus of plant in family Rutaceae. It comprises around 90 species, mainly from tropical Africa, Madagascar and the Mascarene Islands and at a lesser extent Arabia and India. Species , Plants of the World Online (PoWO) accepted t ...

'' from Cameroon in West Central Africa. The trifoliolate leaves of the plant are opposite, and have long petiolules, both unusual features among the West Central African species of the genus. It was formally published as a new species in 2018 from herbarium specimens collected in 1951 by the Nigerian forester Edwin Ujor from Bali Ngemba Forest Reserve, a remnant of

submontane forest Montane ecosystems are found on the slopes of mountains. The alpine climate in these regions strongly affects the ecosystem because temperatures lapse rate, fall as elevation increases, causing the ecosystem to stratify. This stratification is ...

of great conservation importance in the

Bamenda Bamenda, also known as Abakwa and Mankon Town, is a city in northwestern Cameroon and capital of the Northwest Region (Cameroon), Northwest Region. The city has a population of about six hundred thousand people and is located north-west of the C ...

Highlands of Cameroon. No other specimens of the species have yet been found despite targeted searches by teams of botanists in the early years of the twenty-first century. It has not yet been formally assessed by the

IUCN The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is an international organization working in the field of nature conservation and sustainable use of natural resources. Founded in 1948, IUCN has become the global authority on the status ...

but it is believed to be Critically Endangered (Possibly Extinct) due to

habitat loss Habitat destruction (also termed habitat loss or habitat reduction) occurs when a natural habitat is no longer able to support its native species. The organisms once living there have either moved elsewhere, or are dead, leading to a decrease ...

Sources

bali Bali (English:; Balinese language, Balinese: ) is a Provinces of Indonesia, province of Indonesia and the westernmost of the Lesser Sunda Islands. East of Java and west of Lombok, the province includes the island of Bali and a few smaller o ...

Flora of Cameroon Vulnerable flora of Africa Taxa named by Martin Cheek {{Rutaceae-stub