How to save plants from extinction
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How can we save plants? First of all by understanding that they can be saved. Yes, because there are no technical reasons, he says Richard T. Corlett of the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden in Yunnan (China) because any plant species should become extinct. If anything, the problem is to understand it, and to put together all the necessary efforts to protect the plant kingdom, overcoming what the researcher does not hesitate to define a “zoocentrism“ in conservation efforts. We think a lot, too much about animals, and still too little about plants. The underlying issue, argues Corlett on the pages of Trends in Plant Science, is to understand that there are many ways to conserve a plant. Also accepting the idea of ”captive” conservation, where climate changes, soil consumption and erosion And illnesses threaten natural environments.
In fact, there are several ways to keep a plant alive. In fact, a plant can be conserved where it lives, in situ, in protected areas, writes Corlett, or ex situ, in botanical gardens, seed banks, freezers. Each of this strategy has its costs, of course: from the choice of destination for a plot of land, to direct and indirect management costs, to monitoring, to possibly dedicated personnel, but some of these costs can be revised downwards by adopting a conservative. For example the author imagines the creation of micro reserves – areas with a surface area below 50 hectares – as a possible alternative to the more traditional protected areas, particularly suitable for plants with restricted endemisms.
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However, in situ conservation strategies may not be enough. In this sense, combining ex situ strategies – botanical gardens, but also urban reserves, public and private – could help, keeping in mind that we are dealing, so to speak, with second choices: the selection of plants to be allocated to these “artificial” collections, in fact, has often proved to be not very representative, both numerically and from a genetic point of view. Without taking into account all associated species – visible and invisible to the naked eye, like viruses and bacteria – which coexist with plants, and which are only partially reproducible in botanical gardens. Lastly, the conservation of seeds, although possible for many plants, is not for all: not all seeds can be dried and frozen, and not all can be stored for a long time.
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Each of these strategies has clear limitations, but together – in what Corlett calls one integrated conservation strategy – could guarantee a future for plants. Maybe a strategy that also includes the possibility, one day, to regenerate extinct plants modify existing plant relatives. What is missing to prevent that 21-44% of vascular plants today threatened by extinction really disappear more than the technologies are the means, and the intentions: money, personnel, spaces, data on the state of conservation. And knowledge: it is estimated that up to 25% of vascular plants are still unknown. And the “undescribed plants are invisible to science and conservation strategies,” writes the researcher.
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