British wildflowers endangered
Senior botanists have been shocked by a new report which estimates that nearly one in five of Britain’s wild flower species is threatened.
While conservation efforts in Britain have succeeded in averting the extinction of many rare wildflowers, more common plants have been neglected and are now at risk, according to the Red List of endangered species.
Once common native plants now enjoy only sparse populations in the British countryside, with species including purple milk-vetch, annual knawel, lesser butterfly and frog orchids, and corn buttercup undergoing rapid decline.
English Nature’s botanical adviser, Simon Leach, hopes the updated list will refocus conservation efforts: “We are hoping that agri-environment schemes and other landscape-scale initiatives will help to arrest and reverse the decline of many of these declining species.”
The degradation of countryside and fragmentation of habitats is posing a massive challenge to the future of British wildflowers, the report warns.
Reformed countryside management policies are necessary, the researchers argue, to tackle a variety of problems including the overgrazing of uplands, the disappearance of arable “weeds” growing among crops and the shrinking of rough grassland to small fragments found on roadsides.
The Red List is the result of a two-year analysis of British flora collaborated on by many bodies including the countryside council for Wales, English Nature, Natural History museum, Plantlife, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh and Scottish Natural Heritage.
