Plants - Artensterben

For some plant species, fewer than ten mature wild plants remain in nature—sometimes even just a single individual. Such species show how far a decline can go: habitats shrink, populations break apart, and in the end only isolated plants remain, their survival often depending on chance. 15 plant species with

Plant Blindness: Zwergkrug (Cephalotus follicularis)

The Albany pitcher plant (Cephalotus follicularis) from Western Australia belongs to an evolutionarily unique plant lineage with no close relatives. This carnivorous plant catches insects with pitcher-shaped pitfall traps—and perhaps for that very reason shows how often people only notice plants when they seem to have "animal-like" traits. Image: chum_, CC BY-NC 4.0, via iNaturalist

17. May 2026 Doreen Fräßdorf

Plant blindness: Why plant extinction often goes unnoticed

Many people barely notice plants consciously. On a theater stage, they would in a sense be the backdrop, while animals would stand in the foreground as the actual actors. Plants often appear only as a “green mass”, not as living beings in their own right, with individual species, complex adaptations

Threatened by invasive species: Partula radiolata

The endangered tree snail Partula radiolata from the island of Guam. A recent study shows that snails are particularly often victims of invasive species: since the 1970s, the introduction of the rosy wolfsnail has led to the extinction of more than 50 Partula species on Pacific islands. (© USFWS - Pacific Region, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

17. February 2026 Doreen Fräßdorf

Invasive species & extinction: What role do non-native animals and plants play?

Whether rats on tropical islands, introduced snails in the Pacific, or feral cats in remote bird colonies – invasive alien species (IAS) can throw entire ecosystems off balance and push animal and plant species to the brink of extinction. In 2023, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

Osterinsel (Rapa Nui) – Wie Pazifische Ratten die Insel entwaldeten

A single moai in front of the Ahu Tongariki platform on Rapa Nui: the iconic stone statues now stand in a largely treeless landscape—a stark contrast to the dense palm forests that once covered the island before invasive rats and human use fundamentally changed the ecosystem.

14. November 2025 Doreen Fräßdorf

Easter Island: How Introduced Rats Made Rapa Nui’s Forests Disappear

When the Dutch navigator Jakob Roggeveen reached the coast of a remote island in the South Pacific on Easter Sunday in 1722 as the first Western European to do so, he must have been surprised. Before him lay a subtropical volcanic island—but instead of the dense forests one would expect

Slender-billed curlew: Now declared extinct with the update of the IUCN Red List 2025

Slender-billed Curlew: The migratory bird once bred in western Siberia and wintered around the Mediterranean. Missing since 1995, its extinction has now been officially confirmed by the IUCN – the first human-caused bird extinction on mainland Europe in modern times. (© Internet Archive Book Images, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

11. October 2025 Doreen Fräßdorf

IUCN Red List 2025: Eight more animal species officially extinct

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) presented a new update of the Red List of Threatened Species on 10 October 2025 – this time at the World Conservation Congress in Abu Dhabi. The updated list now includes 172,620 species worldwide, among them 48,646 classified as threatened and 935

Pestizide in der Landwirtschaft führen zum Artenschwund

Pesticide use in agriculture: A tractor sprays a field with chemical crop protection products. Such applications have far-reaching consequences for the environment because they can affect not only pests, but also numerous non-target organisms and entire ecosystems.

14. February 2025 Doreen Fräßdorf

Agriculture: Pesticides drive species extinction

Pesticides are used worldwide in modern agriculture to combat undesirable organisms—so-called pests—and secure crop yields. But these chemical crop protection products do not act only on the intended target organisms; they also harm a wide range of plants, animals and microorganisms that are essential to ecological balance. A comprehensive study,

Key Largo tree cactus (Pilosocereus millspaughii)

The Key Largo tree cactus is now considered extinct in the United States. Small populations of this very rare plant species still exist in the Bahamas, Haiti, Cuba, and the Turks and Caicos Islands. (© Luke Padon, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

12. July 2024 Doreen Fräßdorf

Loss in the USA: Key Largo tree cactus wiped out by climate change

Scientists have documented the first local extinction of a species caused by climate change and the associated rise in sea level. The Key Largo tree cactus (Pilosocereus millspaughii), which can grow up to seven meters tall and occurred in the U.S. only on the Florida Keys, has disappeared. This rare,

IUCN Red List 2024: Borneo pygmy elephant threatened with extinction

Over the past 75 years, the number of Borneo pygmy elephants has declined dramatically. The lowland forests they live in are being cleared on a large scale, so the elephants are now considered endangered. (© Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons))

28. June 2024 Doreen Fräßdorf

IUCN Red List 2024: A thousand additional animal and plant species threatened with extinction

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has published its latest Red List of threatened species. In its 60th year, the list—covering more than 163,040 species—warns of a worrying rise in animals and plants threatened with extinction. More than 45,000 species are now at risk—1,000 more than the previous

Researchers have rediscovered the plant species Kattupoovamkurunnila (Uniyala multibracteata) in the Western Ghats, a mountain range in western India. (© Raju, R., J. Joseph, K.S. Divya, C. Badekar & J. Augustine (2024). Uniyala multibracteata (Gamble) H.Rob. & Skvarla (Asteraceae: Vernoniae): notes on its identity and rediscovery.Journal of Threatened Taxa 16(4): 25107–25110. https://doi.org/10.11609/jott.8763.16.4.25107-25110)

12. May 2024 Doreen Fräßdorf

India: Researchers Rediscover Rare Tree Species After 140 Years

After 140 years, researchers have accidentally rediscovered the tree species Uniyala multibracteata, believed to have been lost and locally known as Kattupoovamkurunnila, in the unprotected mountain regions of Vagamon in India’s Western Ghats. This is according to a recently published study in the Journal of Threatened Taxa. Kattupoovamkurunnila, originally discovered

Hollies are also known as winterberries or Christmas thorn and are found in all climate zones worldwide. Most of these plants are native to the subtropics and tropics. (© Kristina D.C. Hoeppner from Wellington, New Zealand, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

21. September 2023 Doreen Fräßdorf

Brazil: Extinct Tree Species Rediscovered After Nearly 200 Years

According to a report by the organization re:wild, an expedition team led by ecologist Gustavo Martinelli has now rediscovered the holly species Ilex sapiiformis in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco. The tree species had been considered extinct for nearly two centuries. The Scottish biologist George Gardner first collected the plant

Tag: Plants

The world’s loneliest plants: Species with fewer than ten individuals