Saving Plants with Teamwork: 20 Years of Hawaii’s Plant Extinction Prevention Program

Over the last twenty years, the Hawai’i Plant Extinction Prevention Program (PEPP) has maintained a singular goal: to halt the loss of native plant species in Hawaiʻi. To be effective, PEPP relies on an expanding partnership of public agencies, private landowners, scientific researchers, propagation experts, and volunteers. This presentation will review the challenges PEPP faces in working with conservation-reliant species, provide an overview of the best management practices for controlling threats and securing propagules, and consider some next steps for the recovery of critically rare plant species in a changing climate. Since PEPP started in 2003, the extinction rate of native plants has tripled. Techniques for saving species ex situ, in seed banks, plant nurseries, micropropagation, and cryopreservation were developed and improved to provide a safety net that averted the total extinction of twenty-eight species. Identifying limiting factors for population growth is complicated by overlapping impacts of predators, limited gene flow between individuals and populations, and reduced habitat available for restoration outplanting. Methods for reducing the impacts of invasive species have improved, but are not deployed broadly or frequently enough to make a lasting impact, especially for rats and slugs. This session will describe what has been done and what is needed to protect Hawaiʻi’s threatened plants and consider novel scenarios including moving species to new islands and genetic rescue, especially in the face of changing climates and habitats.