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The IUCN Threatened Plants Committee and Its Work Throughout the World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2009

Grenville Ll. Lucas  and
A. H. M. Synge
Grenville Ll. Lucas
Affiliation:
The Herbarium, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Surrey, England.
A. H. M. Synge
Affiliation:
The Herbarium, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Surrey, England.
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After stressing the importance of the plant kingdom to Man and the dangers threatening the survival of an estimated 20,000 species of flowering plants, this paper presents details of the activities of the IUCN Threatened Plants Committee (TPC), set up by the Survival Service Commission in 1974. The Secretariat of the TPC works through three main approaches: (1) regional groups of botanists and other experts identifying threats to their floras, advising the TPC, and preparing recommendations; (2) specialist groups doing similar work for plant groups such as palms and cycads; and (3) institutional support of botanic gardens and similar organizations maintaining collections of threatened species in cultivation. This last aspect was launched at a conference on conservation held at Kew in 1975.

The primary aim of the TPC is to gather and disseminate information on which species are threatened throughout the world. Accurate documentation is essential, and in this task both herbarium and field work are needed. Although our knowledge in general of temperate, subtropical, and islands, floras is reasonably good in most cases, and there are specialists working on most of such areas, our knowledge of continental tropical floras is much less comprehensive. There is an urgent need for check-lists to be rapidly compiled for such areas wherever possible. In tropical rain-forests, the difficulties encountered in listing threatened species are particularly acute.

Provided present collaboration continues and finance is provided, initial lists of rare and threatened species will become available within the next decade for many areas. This information should be of great value in preventing needless extinction through lack of planning or forethought, in providing a valuable input in the selection of sites for reserves, etc., and in complementing habitat conservation approaches—as well as helping to stimulate action on individual species.

The ‘Red Data’ categories used by IUCN to indicate the degrees of threat to individual species are outlined, and will be used in the three types of TPC publication—regional lists of rare and threatened species, bulletins on smaller areas with more detail on each species, and sheets for the Red Data Book which will give detailed case-histories of a limited selection of threatened species. All three approaches are under way; the European List has been completed, bulletins for many areas are on the way, and the TPC aims to start issuing new plant Red Data sheets in 1977–78.

Type
Main Papers
Information
Environmental Conservation , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1977 , pp. 179 - 187
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation for Environmental Conservation 1977

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