Terrestrial orchid conservation in the age of extinction.

By N. Swarts, Kingsley W. Dixon. Annals of Botany, 2009

722 citations recorded by the source corpus.

BACKGROUND Conservation through reserves alone is now considered unlikely to achieve protection of plant species necessary to mitigate direct losses of habitat and the pervasive impact of global climate change. Assisted translocation/migration represent new challenges in the face of climate change; species, particularly orchids, will need artificial assistance to migrate from hostile environments, across ecological barriers (alienated lands such as farmlands and built infrastructure) to new climatically buffered sites. The technology and science to underpin assisted migration concepts are in their infancy for plants in general, and orchids, with their high degree of rarity, represent a particularly challenging group for which these principles need to be developed. It is likely that orchids, more than any other plant family, will be in the front-line of species to suffer large-scale extinction events as a result of climate change. SCOPE The South West Australian Floristic Region (SWAFR) is the only global biodiversity hotspot in Australia and represents an ideal test-bed for development of orchid conservation principles. Orchids comprise 6 % of all threatened vascular plants in the SWAFR, with 76 out of the 407 species known for the region having a high level of conservation risk. The situation in the SWAFR is a portent of the global crisis in terrestrial orchid conservation, and it is a region where innovative conservation solutions will be required if the impending wave of extinction is to be averted. Major threatening processes are varied, and include land clearance, salinity, burning, weed encroachment, disease and pests. This is compounded by highly specialized pollinators (locally endemic native invertebrates) and, in the most threatened groups such as hammer orchids (Drakaea) and spider orchids (Caladenia), high levels of mycorrhizal specialization. Management and development of effective conservation strategies for SWAFR orchids require a wide range of integrated scientific approaches to mitigate impacts that directly influence ecological traits critical for survival. CONCLUSIONS In response to threats to orchid species, integrated conservation approaches have been adopted (including ex situ and translocation principles) in the SWAFR with the result that a significant, multidisciplinary approach is under development to facilitate conservation of some of the most threatened taxa and build expertise to carry out assisted migration to new sites. Here the past two decades of orchid conservation research in the SWAFR and the role of research-based approaches for managing effective orchid conservation in a global biodiversity hotspot are reviewed.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Pharmacology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c7e135c8b0242c4a3d0f1b9807271d0037ea12d8

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecological Modeling

1. A. Hoffmann
2. Hong Liu
3. Hongxia Liu
4. Yibo Luo
5. Andrew Lowe
6. Kingsley W. Dixon
7. Zhiyao Tang
8. C. Sgrò

In Pharmacology

1. Hong Liu
2. Hongxia Liu
3. Yibo Luo
4. S. Hopper

In Social Psychology

1. Hong Liu
2. Hongxia Liu
3. Yibo Luo

Citations in the corpus

• Conservation and sustainable use of medicinal plants: problems, progress, and prospects (2016, background): “Ex situ conservation aims to cultivate and naturalize threatened species to ensure their continued survival and sometimes to produce large quantities of planting material used in the creation of drugs, and it is often an immediate action taken to sustain medicinal plant resources [45, 46].”
• Biodiversity conservation and conservation biotechnology tools (2011, background): “Orchids, one of the largest and most diverse families of flowering plants, face an uncertain future through unscrupulous collection, the impacts of climate change and habitat loss (Swarts and Dixon 2009).”
• Orchid biogeography and factors associated with rarity in a biodiversity hotspot, the Southwest Australian Floristic Region (2011, background): “The ecology of mycorrhizal fungi, the specificity of their relationship with orchids, and the phenology of infection may play a role in orchid speciation and rarity (Swarts & Dixon, 2009).”
• Distribution and conservation of orchid species richness in China (2015, background): “The susceptibility and limited distribution may cause large-scale extinction events in orchids under future climate change (Swarts and Dixon, 2009).”
• Studies of Mycorrhizal Fungi of Chinese Orchids and Their Role in Orchid Conservation in China—A Review (2010, methodology): “In response to threats to orchid species, integrated conservation approaches have been adopted elsewhere, including ex situ and translocation principles (Swarts & Dixon, 2009; Seaton et al., 2010, this volume).”
• Building evolutionary resilience for conserving biodiversity under climate change (2010, background): “…extinction, and the option of assisted migration to alleviate these threats has been the focus of increasing debate (Hunter 2007; McLachlan et al. 2007; Grueber and Jamieson 2008; Hoegh-Guldberg et al. 2008; Menges 2008; Ricciardi and Simberloff 2009; Richardson et al. 2009; Swarts and Dixon 2009).”