Cycads need love too (Image: John Cancalos/Ardea)

They’re not as photogenic as pandas, nor as captivating as tigers: among conservationists, plants have tended to attract rather less attention than animals. That could start to change with the publication this week of the first list of extinction risks for the world’s plants.

The Sampled Red List Index for Plants indicates that 22 per cent of all wild plant species face extinction, comparable to the figure for mammals (21 per cent) and higher than that for birds (12 per cent). Of the threatened plant species, 63 per cent are found in tropical rainforest areas which could soon be cleared.

The aim is to provide a baseline for future assessments, and to put plants firmly on the conservation agenda.


“If all the plants vanish, so will all animals and birds,” says Eimear Nic Lughadha of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London, who led the project. The UK Natural History Museum and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature were also involved.

What makes this list different from previous efforts is that it is based on scientifically defensible data, Lughadha says. Her team concluded that it was impossible to comprehensively evaluate the status and fate of all 380,000 known plant species, as has been done for the world’s 10,000 bird species. So instead they decided to emulate the way existing Red List estimates of risks to birds, mammals and amphibians were compiled.

That meant investigating a sample of plant species chosen for their taxonomic and regional coverage. “We wanted to take a sample of plants that we could defend as being representative of plant diversity globally,” says Lughadha.

Although they intended to study 7000 species, the team has decided to publish preliminary conclusions based on the 4000 species for which they have satisfactory data. The results are broken down into five broad groups of plants: monocots, including palms, orchids and grasses (with the major grain crops among them); bryophytes, including mosses and liverworts; pteridophytes, including ferns; gymnosperms, including conifers and cycads; and dicots, encompassing other plants.

Of these groups, the conifers and cycads are most threatened, with 36 per cent facing extinction.

“It’s not a question of picking out ‘star’ plants, but saying plants are integral to human and animal health,” says Lughadha. “We do not know which plants underpin which particular ecosystems.

“At the moment we’re throwing away species that we don’t fully understand.”