SePPCon 2024 Special Interest Talk: You Can’t Conserve What You Don’t Know Exists

Botanical discovery continues at a very substantial pace in the Southeastern United States. New species being described (or old species being “re-recognized” after a period of deprecation) are disproportionately narrow endemics and habitat specialists that were not discovered and understood in the first centuries of modern botanical exploration. In an era of regional rapid change and habitat alteration and destruction, we are thus faced with the urgency of bringing these species to light, understanding their rarity, imperilment, and biology, and serving information about them, as their existence and geographic locations have major implications for conservation action in the region — through citizen science, Heritage tracking and inventory, formal listing as E or T, ex situ conservation, and land acquisition and management. We will discuss the history of the discovery, deprecation, and “rerecognition” of imperiled species over the past 2.5 centuries. We will also present and discuss efforts to make information on all imperiled taxa accessible and “actionable” by federal, state, NGO, and private individuals through the Flora of the Southeastern States (FSUS) Project.