The Plants That CNPS Doesn’t (yet?) Protect

By Frank Landis, Chair Conservation Committee

Presumably I’m courting a jinx, but October was a fairly quiet month on conservation. Instead of an action alert, I thought I’d write a brief thought piece about the limits of CNPS conservation and science activities, and where we need to expand. 

One limit is that we don’t do marine species. Every once in a while someone asks why CNPS doesn’t get into protecting kelp forests. The simple reason is that kelp aren’t plants. To unpack this a bit, modern genomic biology has demonstrated conclusively that multicellularity arose multiple times in eukaryotic life, and that a bunch of those independent evolutions occurred in what we call algae. One lineage only (green algae) led to land plants, and kelps are on a very different branch of the tree of life. Indeed, they’re closer to the Phytophthoras, those notorious plant “fungi,” than they are to land plants. Phytophthoras aren’t fungi any more than kelp are plants, and convergent evolution sure is fun. 

However, there are marine vascular plants: the seagrasses, which are perfectly good monocots, sometimes nicknamed “vegetable whales” (family Zosteraceae). None of the four species are particularly rare in San Diego, but seagrass beds are a fairly rare plant community that is protected. 

However, CNPS doesn’t really advocate for them. We leave that up to the marine groups like Coastkeeper. Part of the reason is that marine conservation falls under a different set of regulations than does land conservation, so if we wanted to branch out, we’d have to master a whole new set of laws and develop whole new sets of working relationships. And that’s a lot of work that so far we haven’t done. 

A second limit is location. Technically, our chapter covers Imperial County as well as San Diego County. However, our chapter conservation activities in Imperial are quite limited, mostly because not much is happening in comparison to San Diego County. In part, desert activities get picked up by the CNPS Southern California conservation analyst, Nick Jensen, and in part, we rely on our sister environmental groups to help. 

The third group we don’t do enough with is the most important, at least in my opinion: cryptogamic crusts. I actually do advocate for these and the species that require them. Unfortunately, they’re not mapped as a separate plant community, as vernal pools are, nor are they known nearly as well. And that’s a problem. 

In the big picture in San Diego County, we’ve got a two-way split in conservation strategies. Conservation of rare plants and vegetation types are important across the Chapter’s entire range, but the how we accomplish that varies. In the rural east county, I and other conservationists emphasize preserving north-south wildlife corridors, so that animals and the plants they carry can migrate in response to climate change, as well as live where they currently live. That kind of migration is less possible for coastal species: we do have some wildlife corridors in the urban areas, but they run east-west, so a coastal species trying to escape climate change would have to migrate into the hotter interior before it could find a route north. As a result, coastal conservation has to be about protecting species where they live, as well as having the difficult conversations about what we do when they can no longer live in the little parks that are left to them. 

This is where the cryptogamic crusts have it hard. They still occur in some parks and on the marine bases, but they’re under attack by everything from mountain bikers to invasive grasses to homeless encampments to developments. And because they’re not mapped, we don’t really know how many are left or what shape they’re in, or even how diverse they are. 

Worse, perhaps, there are five CRPR listed species that occur in cryptogamic crusts, including two that are really rare. They are: 

• Campbell’s liverwort (Geothallus tuberosus, list 1B.1) 

• Bottle liverwort (Sphaerocarpos drewei, list 1B.1) 

• Woven-spored lichen (Texosporium sancti-jacobi, List 3) (Yes, we cover terrestrial lichens but not marine monocots) 

• California adder’s tongue (Ophioglossum californicum, List 4) 

• Ashy spikemoss (Selaginella cinerascens, List 4) 

You’re probably most familiar with the spikemoss, as the others are tiny winter ephemerals, but they all occur in cryptogamic crusts, predominantly in developed areas. If we want the crusts to stick around, we need to study them, start advocating for them, and start talking about listing the two liverworts so that their habitat has real protection. There’s some interest in this in official quarters, and things won’t get better for these species without us advocating for them.