Identifying Plants of One Known Occurrence for Priority Conservation Action

A new geologic era requires new methods to prevent plant extinctions. Two recent publications on plant extinctions, one at the global scale and one for the U.S.A. and Canada, discovered that plants known from just a single site are most likely to go extinct. In the U.S. and Canada, 64% of all known plant extinctions were single-site endemics. There is an obvious need to identify and prioritize plants of one known occurrence (OKO) for prioritized conservation action, but no current methodology exists to identify plants of such extremely limited geographic distribution. We will present preliminary data on OKO plants, our current methodology to identify them, and discuss where in situ and ex situ actions may need to be prioritized to prevent future extinction events.