Bangladesh has initiated efforts to revive five species of plants currently listed as critically endangered on the country’s red list, as well as bring back two species declared locally extinct, reports Mongabay’s Abu Siddique.
The critically endangered plants include two species of orchids: bulborox or the Sikkim bulb-leaf orchid (Bulbophyllum roxburghii), and the small-bulb orchid (Bulbophyllum oblongum), both found only in parts of the country’s Sundarbans wetland.
The three other critically endangered species are the dwarf date palm (Phoenix acaulis), a small palm species currently present only in Dinajpur district’s sal (Shorea robusta) forest; chaulmoogra (Hydnocarpus kurzii), an evergreen tree found in the forests of Bandarban, Rangamati, Cox’s Bazar, Chittagong, Moulvibazar and Habiganj districts; as well as bash pata (Podocarpus neriifolius), a conifer with only 111 individuals known to exist across several districts.
To help these five species recover, the Bangladesh Forest Department in collaboration with the Bangladesh National Herbarium, National Botanical Garden and IUCN Bangladesh are working to grow their seedlings in nurseries, before moving them to suitable habitats.
“Our team is working to protect the species from extinction. Besides the conservation of the five critically endangered species, we are trying to collect two [locally] extinct plants — gola anjan [Memecylon ovatum] and fita champa [Magnolia griffithii] — from our neighboring countries as we share nearly similar ecosystems,” Syeda Rizwana Hasan, adviser to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, told Mongabay.
All five plant species identified for revival were categorized as critically endangered in Bangladesh’s first-ever plant red list published in November 2024.
Of Bangladesh’s known 3,813 plant species, the conservation status of only around 1,000 species has been assessed, red list project coordinator A.B.M. Sarowar Alam told Mongabay.
“[I]f we can finish the rest of the species, we will be able to do the Red List indexing properly, which will help to protect all the species from risk of extinction,” Alam added.
Read the full story by Abu Siddique here.
Banner image: Bulborox orchid (Bulbophyllum roxburghii), critically endangered in Bangladesh. Image by Plant.Hunter via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
This story first appeared on Mongabay
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