In many countries people collect fx. cones and other kind of seeds of trees and get paid. Then the volontary people plant trees every year. Now we have to act in some way.
This small tree (up to 6 meters tall) only occurs in a 100 km² (24,700 acres) area on bluffs and ravines along the Apalachicola River in (you guessed it) Florida. The number of adult trees dying each year outnumbers the number of seedlings growing up, resulting in a net decline for two decades. Why the tree fails to regenerate from seed is not understood. Some populations are protected in the Torreya State Park and the Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Preserve; however, U.S. and Florida policies do not require protection of endangered species on private lands, so some populations on private lands are in danger of destruction. This tree’s genus has bark that contains taxol, a chemical used in cancer treatment, although Florida yew is not usually cultivated for this purpose, as its congener Pacific yew (T. brevifolia) is. This critically endangered tree is often used as an example of why conservation is important for future unknown uses, since taxol’s use as a cancer treatment was discovered in 1971.
North America has a rich history of forest change due to climate change following the last Ice Age, and due to more current changes following European settlement. All this change has resulted in pockets of very interesting, often half-forgotten trees smattered throughout the continent. I wanted to give them a little recognition.
But I had a problem: How do you define rare? You could call a species rare if it has a very small range size. But with that criterion, you would miss some species that are rare, because some trees can be widespread but extremely rare within their range. Is it the smallest number of individuals? There are so many species for which this number is unknown. Does rare implicate the trees that have experienced the most decline? Again, this may or may not have been measured. I decided to use the IUCN Red List as a guide, because range, population size, and decline are taken into account cohesively to qualify for listing. Botanists often use the term “rare” to denote an uncommon species that is not necessarily declining or at major risk of decline. In this case, I have chosen trees that are at major risk of decline, either because their numbers are so few that if some die off randomly, the entire population’s ability to reproduce will be affected, or because of some external factor exacerbating decline, or both.
