Rare Plant Conservation for 2021

By Frank Landis, CNPS-SD Conservation Committee Chair

I’m in a weird headspace at the moment. Supposedly, I should be thinking about how to recruit people to do rare plant surveys in 2021, despite the abysmal rain and general paucity of plants. On the other three hands (I recruited my wife to help), I’m doing conservation, so the question of “how to get interested citizens involved in rare plant science takes on a rather…different perspective. So, let’s go with it. You, dear reader, want to get involved with California rare native plants. What should you do?

First, you need to understand the scope of the problem. According to Jon Rebman of SDNHM, San Diego County has around 1,700 native plant species (this is species, not subspecies or varieties, and not non-natives. Add that all in and the count goes over 2,700). According to the CNPS rare plants inventory, around 290 of those species are in some way sensitive, 16 are listed as rare threatened or endangered, and over 200 are listed as CRPR list 1B or 2B, meaning they could be listed as threatened or endangered in California.

But wait, it gets worse. At 1,700 native species, San Diego County has more native species than the state of Hawai’i. Or either of the Dakotas. Or even Alaska, for that matter. At 4,207 square miles of land, we’re not quite 200 square miles bigger than the Big Island of Hawai’i (4,028 square miles). And while the Big Island is home to around 185,000 people, San Diego’s home to over 3,338,000 people, or not quite 20 times the population density.

According to Dr. Rebman, even the parks in the City of San Diego are home to around 700 native plant species, of which over 90 are sensitive in some way. The Florida Everglades have about this many native plant species, although to be fair they have around 160 sensitive ones. But places like Peñasquitos and Mission Trails, even Fiesta Island, are collectively on par with the Everglades in biodiversity terms.

That’s why we have a rare plant problem. We’re the most biodiverse county in the US, and also the fifth most populous county in the US. It’s not that San Diego is home to a bunch of overly fussy environmentalists. We really do have more rare species in a smaller space than most states have to deal with.

With that in mind, here are some things you can do to help with native plant conservation, in no particular order:

1. Realize that you live in a place where endangered species like Ambrosia pumila occasionally grow out of the cracks in urban sidewalks. So, learn your local plants, rare and otherwise. Rare plants are not limited to the mountains or the desert. One of the best places to squash a really rare native plant is on the volleyball court on the bayside of Silver Strand State Beach (three list 1B plants grew on that sand in April). Learn your local plants.

2. Protect your local plants. This means things like not stepping on them, or sitting on them, or picking them, or cutting their branches down because they’re slowing your bicycle run down. Keep your dogs and small children out of vernal pools, even though you splashed in mud puddle when you were a kid. Don’t create play areas for your children in open space preserves. Or practice your survival skills there. Respect fences and signs. This is really simple stuff, but one of the reasons we have so many rare plants not doing well is people harm them.

3. Educate your friends and anyone who will talk to you. But you don’t know anything about native plants, right? Well, how about park etiquette? Do you know that? In San Diego City, some lawyer ruled last year that the risk of the city being liable for COVID-19 exposure outweighed the utility of having volunteers in parks, so all organized volunteer activities were banned. These activities were the backbone of keeping the parks clean and in repair. Simultaneously, the beaches were closed, while people were told to get out in nature for exercise and recreation. You can guess what kind of mess they made, with no one to clean it up. In Peñasquitos, where I volunteer, you can now see over 20 trails going towards the stream, with toilet paper at the end of many. Often in poison oak. This is the level of education any outdoor person can help with: how many San Diegans have no idea what poison oak looks like? How many urbanites have no idea that in the big parks, there’s not a bathroom every block or two, and don’t think to go before they go to the park? How many don’tknow not to relieve themselves next to streams? Since there aren’t any volunteers around to deal with this problem, or to repair fences, close amateur trails, wash off graffiti, or yes, explain that someone’s standing on a rare plant…I can but hope that you’ll step in. With three million people and more coming, everyone who cares about wild spaces needs to help educate people who just moved here from Kansas that they’re literally not in Kansas anymore. Stuff that is perfectly acceptable in a rural state is hideously destructive in an urban preserve that’s sheltering endangered species, and no one gets educated about this when they move here. Want to help?

And here are four more things you can do. The big threats to rare plants are habitat loss, invasive species, and climate change.

4. Losing habitat to development is the big problem, but once a rare plant is preserved in a park, it’s not safe from vandals or flower collectors, or from politicians or planners who think that park is a perfect “blank space on the map” to put a new commuter bike path or a playground. Each of these problems demand different strategies, but the general mantra is that conserved has to mean conserved, not set aside for later use. Unless we live that way, nothing is safe. Anything you can do to help, from showing up at meetings to talking a kid of any age out of building a trail, is a step in the right direction.

5. Weeding as restoration is something our chapter is good at. While I DO NOT recommend weeding around rare plants if you don’t know what you’re doing, keeping the weeds from getting close to the rare plants is something that you can do. For example, there’s a wave of Sahara mustard (Brassica tournefforti) breaking over the patch of rare Nuttall’s lotus (Lotus nuttallianus) on Fiesta Island, and you can pull a lot of Sahara mustard without getting anywhere near the tiny little lotus. Keeping weeds from taking over fields is a chore, but it’s a necessary one. And if you have a knack for that sort of thing, join the CNPSSD restoration committee and get involved.

6. Climate change…that’s the big lurking monster. While it’s currently number three on the list, it will be number one in a few decades, unless we change our lifestyle. So keep working on that.

7. And then there’s the last thing you can do: help everyone keep the other 1,500-odd native plant species in San Diego County from becoming rare. Rare just means a species is in dire need of help. But common species can become rare quite quickly. Look at the American chestnut (Castanea dentata), which went from dominating forests to functionally extinct in a few decades, due to an introduced fungus. This may sound alarmist, but consider our coast live oaks, currently facing both gold-spotted oak borer and two species of shothole borer. They could easily go the way of the American chestnut in the next few decades. What happens then to the hundreds of species that depend on them for food and shelter? Keeping oaks healthy and learning to monitor them for disease is one thing you can learn to do, if you love oaks. This needs to be done for the other 1,500 common species too. Don’t just protect rarities.

Oh, and if you want, you can contact me to learn how to count rare plants. As I hope you can see by now, while this is essential, it really is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to rare plant conservation in San Diego County. There’s a lot for everyone to do. Please help out.

Banner photo: San Diego Button Celery (Eryngium aristulatum var. parishii)

📷: Joanna Gilkeson/USFWS public domain