⚠️ Conservation
Plants are disappearing from Earth at a rate that most scientists consider a genuine mass extinction event — yet the plant extinction crisis attracts a fraction of the attention devoted to the more visible losses of mammals and birds. The State of the World's Plants report estimates that approximately 40% of the world's approximately 400,000 plant species face extinction risk — a higher proportion than for any other well-assessed group of organisms. Every year, approximately 2,000 plant species are described as new to science — and many of these newly discovered species are already endangered or extinct in the wild.
of plant species at extinction risk
plant species confirmed extinct since 1750
new species described per year
of drugs derived from plant compounds
The confirmed extinction of 571 plant species since 1750 — documented in the IUCN Red List — almost certainly represents a dramatic underestimate of actual losses. Plants are far less monitored than vertebrates: the majority of botanical surveys focus on accessible, well-studied regions, leaving vast areas — particularly tropical forests — poorly documented. Remote sensing studies suggest that deforestation alone is eliminating plant species at a rate of approximately 3 species per day globally, the majority before they have even been named and described by science.
The Millennium Seed Bank at Kew Gardens in the UK — the world's largest ex-situ plant conservation programme — has banked seeds from over 40,000 plant species, including the majority of the world's most threatened species. Seed banking provides an insurance policy against extinction in the wild: seeds stored at -20°C with low moisture content can remain viable for centuries, preserving the genetic material of species that may no longer exist in any wild population. But seed banking is a last resort, not a solution: species stored only in seed banks have lost their ecological context and their co-evolutionary relationships with pollinators, dispersers, and mycorrhizal partners.
Many endangered plant species face not only the immediate threat of habitat loss but also the long-term genetic consequences of small population size — reduced genetic diversity, inbreeding depression, and reduced adaptive capacity. Conservation genetics provides tools to assess these threats and inform conservation planning: population genetic analysis can reveal how much genetic diversity remains in a species, whether populations are isolated from one another (preventing gene flow), and whether inbreeding is occurring at a rate likely to cause demographic decline. For species with only a few dozen individuals remaining — like the dragon tree of the Canary Islands or the wollemi pine of Australia — population genetic analysis is essential for prioritising which individuals to collect for ex situ conservation and which populations to connect through translocation programs.
The seed bank revolution — the establishment of large-scale cryogenic seed storage facilities — has transformed the practical ability to conserve plant genetic diversity. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, opened in 2008 in the Norwegian Arctic, can store up to 4.5 million seed varieties and currently holds approximately 1.4 million samples, representing a backup for the world's crop diversity. The Millennium Seed Bank at Kew Gardens has conserved seeds from approximately 40,000 wild plant species, with a target of 25% of the world's plant species by 2020. However, not all plants can be conserved by seed banking: "recalcitrant" species — including many tropical trees and plants with large, oily seeds — cannot survive the drying and freezing process, requiring alternative approaches including tissue culture, cryopreservation of embryos, and living collections.
Vascular plant extinctions — the permanent loss of plant species — are occurring at rates dramatically higher than the pre-human background extinction rate of approximately 0.1 extinctions per million species per year. A comprehensive analysis published in Nature Plants in 2019, based on the IUCN Red List and herbarium records, estimated that approximately 571 plant species have been definitively lost since 1750 — a rate approximately 500 times higher than background — and that approximately 40% of all described plant species are threatened with extinction under current conditions. However, these figures likely dramatically underestimate the true scale of plant extinction, because the botanical community has described only a fraction of the world's plant species, and many plants go extinct before being described by science.
Seed banks — ex situ collections of plant genetic material preserved at sub-zero temperatures — have emerged as the primary insurance policy against plant extinction. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located 130 metres inside a sandstone mountain on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, now holds over 1.3 million seed samples representing 6,400 plant species from every country in the world — the largest and most diverse collection of plant genetic material ever assembled. The Millennium Seed Bank at Kew Gardens holds seeds of over 40,000 plant species — approximately 15% of all flowering plant species — and is working toward the ambitious target of banking 75% of the world's seed-bearing plants by 2030. While seed banks preserve genetic material, they cannot preserve the ecological relationships, co-evolutionary adaptations, and ecosystem functions of wild plant populations — making them a complement to, not a substitute for, in situ conservation.
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Dr. Osei has spent 17 years studying plant evolution, pollination ecology, and botanical diversity across West Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Amazon. Her research examines how plants adapt, reproduce, and interact with the animal world.