Threatened Plant Species & their Conservation in Sri Lanka.

Gayesha Jayasinghe

Plants are a vital part of the world’s biological diversity & an essential resource for human well being. Beside the crop plants that provide our basic food & fibers, many thousands of wild plants have great economic & cultural importance & potential, providing food, medicine, fuel, clothing & shelter for vast number of people throughout the world. Plants also play a key role in maintaining basic ecosystem functions & are essential for the survival of the world’s animal life.
Yet, despite our reliance on plants, crisis point has been reached. Although much work remains to be carried out to evaluate the status of the plants, it is clear that about species are threatened in Sri Lanka. There are 280 plant species are threatened in Sri Lanka.

Plants are endangered by a combination of factors; over collecting, unsustainable agriculture & forestry practices, urbanization, pollution, land use changes, & the spread of invasive alien species & climate change.

The IUCN Red List is the world’s most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of plant & animal species. It uses a set of criteria to evaluate the extinction risk of thousands of species & subspecies. The Red List can answer commonly asked questions such as, how threatened is a particular species? What are the threats to a species? etc. There are nine categories in the IUCN Red List system. In that categories there are Critically Endangered, Endangered and Vulnerable. Those are collectively called as “Threatened”. These criteria are based on biological factors related to extinction risk & include: decline, population size, area of geographic distribution & degree of population & distribution fragmentation. So we need conservation methods to protect these threatened plant species. The conservation can be divided in to In-situ conservation & Ex-situ conservation. In-situ conservation means “on site conservation”. It is the process of protecting on threatened plant species in its natural habitat. Ex-situ conservation may be used on some or all of the population, when In-situ conservation is too difficult or impossible. As a example we can consider about medicinal plants. About 80 medicinal plants are in threatened. Sri Lankan government takes necessary actions to conserve these. “Conservation & Sustainable use of Medicinal plants” project is an example for it. There are many policies to protect these plant species. “The Fauna & Flora protection ordinance” is the most important one.

There are many constrains to conserve these threatened plants in Sri Lanka. So we have to identify those constrains & give our maximum effort to protect them. Because those are main part in the biodiversity of Sri Lanka.