Where do Canada’s endangered plants grow? And how much attention are they getting?
Hundreds of species are at risk of going extinct in Canada. The list includes birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, molluscs, and insects. But the largest group is plants, which make up 37% of all species at risk.
The Species at Risk Act (SARA) is the law designed to protect endangered species in Canada. A plant that is listed under SARA is protected from destruction automatically, but only if it is growing on federal land.
We wondered how many plants would benefit from this protection. After all, most of Canada’s endangered plants live in the southern parts of the country, where most of the land is privately owned. But no one has estimated how many plant species at risk grow on private land.
Read this open access paper on the FACETS website.
To complement SARA, the Canadian government has two major programs to encourage protection and stewardship of species at risk.
One is the Natural Areas Conservation Program (NACP), which provides money to help buy land for conservation. The other is the Habitat Stewardship Program (HSP) that funds projects run by conservation groups or provincial or municipal governments to help species at risk.
Plants in the United States and Australia get less attention and less money for conservation than some other types of species. We wondered whether plants in Canada are getting as much attention from the NACP and the HSP as other taxonomic groups.
We used publicly available government documents to determine how many plant species listed under SARA have most of their populations on private or federal land.
It turns out that 75% of all listed plants grow at least partly on private land, and 35% of them grow mainly on private land. In contrast, only 10% grow mainly on federal land. This means that programs to help protect plants on non-federal land, like the NACP and the HSP, are crucial to encourage stewardship and prevent destruction of endangered plants.
When we looked at these two programs, however, we found that plants are not represented in proportion to their numbers.
Properties purchased under the NACP have protected populations of about 22% of the plant species listed under SARA, whereas they have protected on average 46% of SARA-listed species in other taxonomic groups.
Although plants represent 37% of species listed under SARA, only 12% of species-specific projects funded by the HSP focused on plants. In comparison, 14% of SARA-listed species are birds, but 22% of HSP projects focused on birds.
Legal protection under SARA does not automatically apply to most plants because they do not grow on federal land. The Canadian government should increase representation of plants in programs like the HSP by actively seeking out projects that include conservation, research, and monitoring of plant species at risk, especially on private land.
Read the paper — Conserving plant species at risk in Canada: land tenure, threats, and representation in federal programs by J.L. McCune and Peter D.S. Morrison.
