Human-caused climate change registered as the second most pervasive threat. A “poster child” for the risks posed by global warming is a medium-size, thick-leafed oak, Wesley Knapp, chief botanist at NatureServe, says.. Just one known individual is left in the wild, located in Texas’s Big Bend National Park, and climate change is rapidly making its habitat unsuitable. “The tree is not long for this world,” Knapp says. may be doomed, other threatened species can be saved, the authors emphasize.
Preventing new tree killers from reaching the United States is also critical, says Leigh Greenwood, a forest specialist at the Nature Conservancy, which was not involved in the research. “This paper is very much a call to action to bolster the prevention strategies that we have against the entry of new forest pests and pathogens.”
Strengthening efforts to collect seeds and tissues from threatened trees and place them in long-term storage or grow them in protected places could help provide a crucial insurance policy, researchers say. Seventeen species flagged in the study don’t appear in any seed bank or collection, the authors found. “If those threatened species disappear from the wild,” Westwood says, “we have no backup.”
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service currently lists just eight U.S. tree species as threatened or endangered. But not all species flagged by the new study would necessarily qualify for federal protection, Westwood says, because the government uses criteria that differ from those used by IUCN and NatureServe. And even if a tree species does qualify, it could take years for officials to add it to the list.
we humans are a barbarians
I’m cutting down the rest of my backyard willows before you show up! I have one that’s 8 feet diameter but the huge limbs broke off each side!