Sri Lanka’s plant messiah spreads optimism for biodiversity & conservation

Sri Lanka’s plant messiah spreads optimism for biodiversity & conservation

When the government of Sri Lanka published the  National Red List of threatened plants in 2020, my eyebrows shot up. We’ve all become accustomed, after all, to the grim news these reports periodically bring us. But here it was, in black and white: 128 species, not having been recorded in surveys conducted during the past century, were assessed as “possibly extinct,” while a further two each were assessed as “extinct” and “extinct in the wild.” T…