I know there are many of you who are great travellers and so I expect you may be interested to hear of this trip which I have been contacted about by Dr Jalil Noroozi.
Jalil Noroozi, a botanist from Iran, working at the Natural History Museum Vienna, writes : I am organizing an excursion to Iranian mountains (Alborz) to see
mountain and subalpine wild flowers from 22 May to 6 June 2016 . Can I send to you the program of the excursion to inform your members? "
Some details of the planned trip are enclosed in the attached pdf. Full details will be sent to those expressing and interest to Jalil direct. He needs to hear from you before 20th March.
Find pdf
HERE 
Jalil Noroozi is the author of
"A glance at the wild flowers of Iranian mountains" 
The following is an abstract from a recent paper published, December 2015 in Alpine Botany
Diversity, distribution, ecology and description rates of alpine endemic plant species from Iranian mountains Jalil Noroozi , Dietmar Moser , Franz Essl
Abstract
Mountain ranges cover around one-half of the territory of Iran. Although it is well-known that these mountains are characterized by high levels of endemism, no assessment of vascular plant endemism of Iranian mountains has been made. Here, we undertake a first analysis of the diversity and biogeography of high-altitude (=taxa, whose elevational distribution ranges are entirely or largely above 2500 m a.s.l.) endemic vascular plant species restricted to Iran. In total, our data set includes 569 endemic vascular plant taxa (incl. 43 subendemic taxa which slightly extend into adjacent countries), which correspond to 62 % of the entire alpine flora. The highest number of alpine endemics occurs in the Zagros, followed by Alborz, and the NW Iranian mountains. Screes, rocks and thorn-cushion grasslands are the most important habitats for the alpine endemics. The altitudinal distribution of Iranian endemic alpine plant taxa peaks at high altitudes at c. 3000 m a.s.l. Below and above this altitude, there is a steep decrease in endemic alpine species numbers. The analysis of description histories in time-to-event analysis framework suggests that the rate by which new Iranian endemic alpine plant species are described does not seem to level off. Therefore, the proportion of species that still remain to be described is difficult to estimate. However, time-to-event analysis shows that at least 7 % of the extant Iranian alpine endemic species are not yet known to science. In addition, on average, the time lag between the year of collection and species description was 18 years. We conclude that there is a need for a continued botanical exploration in particular of under-sampled mountain ranges and for taxonomic revisions of genera rich in endemics which have been insufficiently studied yet.
© Swiss Botanical Society 2015
