Schoepfia harrisii

It is a small tree or large shrub, growing two to five metres tall. In Hermann Otto Sleumer's 1984 monograph on the Neotropical species of Schoepfia he writes that it can exceptionally grow to ten metres, The first specimen was collected by Harris from a shrub which was 15ft high. S. obovata has been misidentified as S. harrisii in the past. This species usually grows at lower elevations; occurs in dry habitats as opposed to moist; has smaller, more regularly shaped leaves which are always blunt at their apexes and have 1-3mm petioles; becomes an erect-growing tree as opposed to a bush; and has yellow to dull red fruits. Proctor considers S. obovata to never be cauliflorous (but Sleumer disagrees). ==Taxonomy==

Schoepfia harrisii was first collected by William Harris, a government botanist, near the village of Troy at the turn of the 19th century. This specimen was then described as a novel species by Ignatz Urban in the 1907 volume of the Symbolae Antillanae, and became the holotype for the new species. having previously been considered included in the Olacaceae. ==Distribution==

It is endemic to Jamaica, where it is only known to occur in two parishes, southernmost Trelawny and northern Clarendon, Specifically, it occurs in scattered locations in Cockpit Country around the northwestern perimeter of the central mountains. ==Ecology==

Sleumer states the species can be found at altitudes of 150-915m in 1984, but this may be due to confusion with a misidentified specimen of S. obovata, which was collected near the southern coast. Proctor, whose specimen it was which was misidentified, gives 'revised' altitudes of in 1982, which is followed by Kelly in 1998. It is only found in Cockpit Country, a karst landscape, a region of many steep, rounded, limestone hills, shaped like a vast egg-carton. Here it grows on crags in moist woodland. It probably blooms in midwinter. ==Conservation==

An initiative taken by Daniel L. Kelly in 1988 to assess a large number of Jamaican endemic plants, according to the standards promulgated by the IUCN at the time (Davis et al., 1986), identified this species of tree as 'rare', i.e. not in danger of extinction, but at risk due to a restricted geographical range. Kelly eventually assessed the species as 'vulnerable' for The World List of Threatened Trees in 1998 (according to a new set of criteria of the time), which was eventually incorporated in the Red List website as the official 1998 assessment. ==References==