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Plant Profile

Wright's Flowering Fern (Anemia wrightii)

Anemia wrightii taken by Lucille, January 30, 2021.

Photo Credit:

Global Rank: G2 - Imperiled
Legal Status: N/A
Family: Anemiaceae
State: FL
Nature Serve ID: 135908
Lifeform: Forb/herb
Categories of Interest: Ferns
Date Inducted in National Collection: 08/30/2021

Description:

Where is Wright's Flowering Fern (Anemia wrightii) located in the wild?

States & Provinces:

Wright's Flowering Fern can be found in Florida

Which CPC Partners conserve Wright's Flowering Fern (Anemia wrightii)?

Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden

Not Sponsored

Conservation Actions

Assigned 08/30/21

National Laboratory for Genetic Resource Preservation (USDA-ARS)

Not Sponsored

Conservation Actions

Assigned 11/17/21

CPC's Plant Sponsorship Program provides long term stewardship of rare plants in our National Collection. We are so grateful for all our donors who have made the Plant Sponsorship Program so successful. We are in the process of acknowledging all our wonderful plant sponsorship donors on our website. This is a work in progress and will be updated regularly.

Conservation Actions

Katie Heineman

11/17/2021

Spores from the 2021 collection of Anemia wrightii are backed up at the National Laboratory for Genetic Resources Preservation

Jennifer Possley

11/10/2021

Wright’s pineland fern (Anemia wrightii)

Thanks to CPC’s new Florida Biobanking initiative, Lydia Cuni and Jennifer Possley from Fairchild’s conservation team ventured out one morning in summer of 2021 in search of spores of Wright’s pineland fern (Anemia wrightii). We were accompanied by Miami-Dade County biologists Tim Joyner and Michelle Huber to a beautifully diverse 20-acre tropical hardwood forest which is part of the County’s Environmentally Endangered Lands Program. Past ventures to collect spores of this rare fern have not always produced results, but thankfully it seemed our timing was perfect this year.

Wright’s pineland fern is a very rare species, even by rare plant standards. It’s known only from Cuba, The Bahamas, and Miami-Dade County in South Florida, where it has been documented in just 3 conservation areas and one private property. The species is difficult to distinguish from a widespread native, the pineland fern (Anemia adiantifolia), and in fact, the two seem to hybridize when growing together (based on our field observations). Fairchild now has some tiny-but-healthy spore-grown plants in cultivation, which we hope to grow to a healthy ex situ collection in the next years . . . or decades (this is a very slow grower!).

Center for Plant Conservation

08/30/2021

Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden plans to make a conservation seed collection of this species in 2021 as part of CPC’s inaugural season of the Florida Plant Rescue seed collections initiative.