Researchers at London’s Kew Gardens stated on Tuesday that millions of undiscovered plant and fungal species may already be in danger of going extinct and urged swift action to conserve them.
Teams are putting in a lot of effort to identify recently discovered species in the vast Royal Botanic Gardens southwest of the British capital in order to hasten their conservation.
Rafael Govaerts is one of them; he examines the exotic plants and luscious palms that Kew’s wrought-iron Palm House has been preserving since its construction in 1848.
In the wild, some of them have already vanished.
A catalog of all known vascular plants, or those with stems and roots, has just been completed by the Belgian botanist and his international colleagues.
Science now has a working knowledge of about 350,000 plant species, but there may be another 100,000 that have not yet received official names.
According to the most recent edition of Kew’s “State of the World’s Plants and Fungi,” which was compiled with assistance from almost 200 scientists worldwide, three out of four of these unnamed species are already probably in danger of going extinct.
To reach that conclusion, researchers cross-checked data from the vast list of vascular plants with the red list from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
“The advice from the scientists is to consider all newly described species as threatened,” Govaerts told AFP.
The report states that as-yet unidentified trees, herbaceous plants and cacti are probably hiding in the remote but biodiverse forests of Brazil, China or New Guinea.
They will now be the focus of efforts to combat climate change and the loss of biodiversity.
45 percent of flowering plants that have previously been found, including those that thrive in the humid environment of the Kew greenhouses, such the South Indian black pepper tree, are also in danger of going extinct.
