Endangered plants

Endangered Plants

Lichens are symbiotic associations of a fungus (the mycobiont) with a photosynthetic partner (the photobiont also known as the phycobiont) that can produce food for the lichen from sunlight. The photobiont is usually either green alga or cyanobacterium.

Baker's larkspur (Delphinium bakeri) is a perennial herb in the buttercup family (Ranunculaceae). It is an endangered species native to California (USA), the current single known population being estimated at 35 individuals.

Hickman’s potentilla (Potentilla hickmanii) is an endangered perennial herb of the rose family. This rare plant species is found in a narrowly restricted range in coastal northern California, primarily along a confined location of northern Monterey County, secondarily in extremely small colonies in San Mateo County and Sonoma County.

Trifolium amoenum, known by the common name Showy Indian clover is an endangered[1] annual herb that subsists in grassland areas of the San Francisco Bay Area and the California Coast Ranges. This wildflower has an erect growth habit and is typically found on heavy soils at elevations less than 100 meters.

The Camperdown Elm Ulmus glabra 'Camperdownii' is a cultivar which cannot reproduce from seed. The grafted Camperdown Elm slowly develops a broad, flat head that may eventually build as high as 4 m (13 feet) and an incommensurately wide crown with a contorted, weeping habit

Conservation Status

IUCN

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) is an international organization dedicated to natural resource conservation. It was previously known as the World Conservation Union.

Founded in 1948, its headquarters is located in the Lake Geneva area in Gland, Switzerland. The IUCN brings together 83 states, 108 government agencies, 766 NGOs and 81 international organizations and about 10,000 experts and scientists from countries around the world.

Habitat fragmentation
Habitat fragmentation is a process of environmental change important in evolution and conservation biology. As the name implies, it describes the emergence of discontinuities (fragmentation) in an organism's preferred environment (habitat). Habitat fragmentation can be caused by geological processes that slowly alter the layout of the physical environment or by human activity such as land conversion, which can alter the environment on a much faster time scale. The former is suspected of being one of the major causes of speciation. The latter is causative in extinctions of many species.

Fragmentation and destruction of Great Ape habitat in Central Africa, from the GLOBIO and GRASP projects.

Habitat fragmentation is frequently caused by humans when native vegetation is cleared for human activities such as agriculture, rural development or urbanization. Habitats which were once continuous become divided into separate fragments. After intensive clearing, the separate fragments tend to be very small islands isolated from each other by crop land, pasture, pavement, or even barren land. The latter is often the result of slash and burn farming in tropical forests. In the wheatbelt of central western New South Wales, Australia 90% of the native vegetation has been cleared and over 99% of the Tallgrass prairie of North America has been cleared, resulting in extreme habitat fragmentation.