[PCA] [FW]: ARTICLE in Science Letters: Fund plant conservation to solve biodiversity crisis

[De Angelis, Patricia]

By Emily Brin Roberson, Anne Frances, Kayri Havens, Joyce Maschinski, Abby Meyer, Lisa Ott

In their Letter “Solve the biodiversity crisis with funding” (20 September 2019, p. 1256), J. Malcom et al. called on the U.S. Congress to fund wildlife conservation programs to protect biodiversity. We agree that such funding is critically important, but we were disappointed that their discussion of biodiversity did not include plants. Even when unintentional, as this omission likely was, citing only animal examples can perpetuate the perception that plant conservation is less important and less worthy of funding (1). Plant conservation programs have been consistently underfunded, especially when compared to funding for animals. Although more than half of the species listed under the federal Endangered Species Act are plants, they receive less than 5% of the total funding for endangered species recovery (2, 3).

This problem is exemplified by the Recovering America's Wildlife Act, introduced in July 2019 (4) and supported by fish and wildlife conservation groups (5, 6). The bill would substantially improve funding for State Wildlife Action Plans (SWAPs), which are among the most effective species conservation programs in the United States. Plants can be listed in SWAPs, but because of antiquated authorizing language, the primary grants that fund SWAPs may only be used to conserve animal species of greatest conservation need, not plants (7). The proposed legislation does not update this language and would allow continued neglect of imperiled plants in SWAPs.

A recent global assessment found that at least 600 plant species are now extinct and that we are losing plant species at a rate 500 times higher than the extinction rate before human impacts (8). The conservation of plant species is essential to the successful conservation of fish, wildlife, pollinators, and other animals, as well as to human survival. It is critical that all efforts to improve funding for conservation explicitly include increased funding for plants. Without adequate conservation programs for plants, wildlife and biodiversity conservation efforts will inevitably be ineffective.

See online:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6475/258.full
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