Building a plant conservation assessment triage - baby steps

On the subject of endangered species, plants don't quite get the same level of attention as the fluffy, furry and feathered mammals and birds. However, they are endangered and they are important. Plants provide us with food, shelter, construction materials, medicine and an almost unquantifiable cultural value. On top of that they provide ecosystem services; those less than obvious supporting functions that help to keep the planet (and humankind) in a reasonably stable state. We've only just started to quantify the economic value of these services, but it no doubt goes into trillions of dollars - see TEEB for more details.

Recent new discoveries of plant species from around the world

Ok. That is the 'why you should care' bit. Now, let's look at the state of knowledge on threat status of plants. According to the foremost source on extinction risk of organisms, the IUCN Red List registers approximately 5% of plants. Whichever way you look at it, that is hardly a representative view of extinction risk in plants. An alternative approach using a random (and therefore representative) sample of plants suggested around 1 in 5 plants could be threatened. Of course the true picture won't be revealed until all plants are assessed and the total estimated (we don't know exactly!) number of plant taxa is around 380,000. At the present rate it would take a few hundred years before that can be achieved.

Results from the Sampled Red List Index for Plants indicating about 1 in 5 plants could be threatened with extinction

So that, in a roundabout way, gets us up-to-date. We need a mechanism to fast-track some plant species for inclusion on the Red List otherwise they will go extinct before we get around to assessing them. One way to do this is to adopt a triage approach. A triage is basically a quick way of ranking a large number of items into a small number of groups so that effort can be prioritised. It is often used in medical emergency situations. By applying a triage to plants we can identify those most likely to be threatened, not threatened or lacking enough data to judge. Those that we group as threatened should be priorities for further work and full Red List assessment.

So what will drive the triage? Amazingly, if you scour the literature you will see there is no shortage of evidence based threat assessments of plants. Although not full IUCN Red List level assessments they may be the best that is known about a particular taxon and are therefore extremely valuable.
Over the next year or so I plan to gather together and compile all these assessments into a single resource so that we have a powerful baseline of information from which we can inform further effort. In this blog I'll keep you posted on progress with this project along with any interesting developments in the world of endangered plants. Better get cracking then....