Species Focus Area
Plants are the base of nearly every food web. When a native plant community disappears, the animals tied to it follow quietly.
Plant conservation is chronically underfunded compared with animals, yet almost every animal recovery depends on a plant community being present first.
Common threats
How people can help
These ten are not a scientific ranking. They were selected for conservation urgency, teaching value, and regional relevance, and each one has a complete, sourced profile.
Critically Endangered (IUCN) / Endangered (ESA)
Zizania texana
An aquatic grass that grows in the wild in exactly one place on earth: the upper two miles of the San Marcos River in Texas.
Endangered (ESA)
Styrax platanifolius ssp. texanus
A flowering shrub clinging to limestone canyon walls in the Texas Hill Country, surviving mainly where livestock and deer cannot reach it.
Endangered (ESA)
Spiranthes parksii
A small terrestrial orchid known only from a handful of east-central Texas counties, easy to overlook and easy to lose.
Threatened (ESA)
Platanthera praeclara
A tallgrass prairie orchid pollinated only by night-flying hawkmoths, declining with the prairie it depends on.
Vulnerable (IUCN) / Endangered (ESA)
Astrophytum asterias
A spineless, disc-shaped cactus of south Texas thornscrub, reduced to a few sites and heavily targeted by illegal collectors.
Endangered (IUCN) / Threatened (ESA)
Pinus albicaulis
A high-elevation tree that holds mountain snowpack, feeds grizzly bears, and depends on a single bird species to plant its seeds.
Extinct in the Wild (IUCN)
Franklinia alatamaha
A flowering tree extinct in the wild since the early 1800s, surviving only because two botanists collected seed before it disappeared.
Threatened (ESA)
Argyroxiphium sandwicense subsp. macrocephalum
A silver rosette plant that grows for decades on a Hawaiian volcano, flowers spectacularly once, and dies.
Vulnerable (IUCN)
Dionaea muscipula
The world's most famous carnivorous plant grows wild only within about a 75-mile radius of Wilmington, North Carolina.
Delisted from the ESA following recovery
Trifolium stoloniferum
A clover that evolved alongside bison herds, nearly vanished when they did, and has since recovered enough to be removed from the endangered species list.