Book: Rare Plants of Texas
Passport to Texas from Texas Parks and Wildlife
The book Rare Plants of Texas from Texas A & M press gets up close and personal with…well…rare Texas plants.
There’s a lot of different definitions of rare.
Co-author, Jackie Poole, explains how the book’s authors defined the term “rare.”
What we basically use for the book is how many populations of those plants exist out there. So, usually, our cutoff criteria is twenty populations of fewer. And that’s on a worldwide basis—that’s not just in Texas.
Species listed as threatened or endangered by the federal and state government were also included in the 225 plants found in this illustrated field guide.
And, a lot of those plants have more than twenty populations known now—they didn’t when they were listed. But, because they get listed, lot more attention gets paid to the; a lot more people go out and find populations. So, they often end up being less rare than the plants that aren’t listed as endangered or threatened.
It’s imperative for us to know which plants are the rarest of the rare so we can protect them and their habitat.
Because they’re often indicators of something that’s going wrong in a particular habitat. And, we can pick up on this early on by noticing the rarest individuals in the community suffering first.
Find out more about rare plants in Texas at passportotexas.org.
That’s our show… For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.
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