Re: What is the most recent new plant species discovered?

The discovery of a conifer tree, golden Vietnamese cypress (Xanthocyparis 
vietnamensis), was publicly announced in November, 2001. That is one of the 
most recent "big" discoveries of a new plant species given that it was a tree. 
The web press release notes that several groups cooperated in the effort 
including Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK; the Vietnamese Institute of 
Terrestrial Ecology in Hanoi; the Komarov Botanical Institute in St Petersburg, 
Russia; and the Missouri Botanical Garden, US.

In January, 2002, a new genus in the ginger family was announced with the new 
species, Smithatris supraneena, from Thailand. Smithsonian's National Museum of 
Natural History botanist W. John Kress and Kai Larsen, University of Aarhus, 
Denmark were the scientists involved.

The US is certainly involved in efforts to find new plant species, with both 
private and public funding. However, you are certainly correct that more should 
be done given the rapid habitat loss and resulting extinction of plant species 
unknown to science. For decades, many universities and federal agencies 
deemphasized or eliminated plant taxonomy/ethnobotany/economic botany so many 
are no longer prepared to work in those areas. One of the inefficient designs 
of US public support of research is that one area gets trendy, and most 
universities change their emphasis to that area to get the research grants. The 
trendy area for the last couple decades has been biotechnology/plant genome 
work with Arabidopsis. 

As I write this on April 21, TV's "60 Minutes" is doing a story on National 
Institute of Mental Health's wasting of research dollars on silly projects and 
not funding more important areas. That is a common charge against federal 
agencies, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), United States 
Department of Agriculture (USDA), and National Institutes for Health (NIH) that 
dole out most of the federal research grant dollars for plant research. Too, 
the USDA is mainly interested in funding cultivated crop research rather than 
searching for new species. The third website cited below discusses the problem 
of inadequate funding for ethnobotany research. There is growing recognition of 
the importance of ethnobotany and discovery of new plant species but it may be 
too little, too late, for many species that may soon be extinct.  

Another part of the problem is that known plants are not always examined for 
medicinal value or developed as potential new food or industrial crops. A lot 
of that may be due to inertia because current major crops, such as corn, wheat 
and soybeans, soak up so much of the research money.

There are so many groups lobbying the federal government for research dollars 
that it is perhaps not surprising that the best lobbied areas get more research 
dollars. Plants are absolutely essential to human survival but often are 
overlooked in favor of animals. This has been termed plant neglect, animal 
chauvinism, or plant blindness. 

I you feel strongly, contact your senator and congressman and lobby for more 
government support for plant exploration and ethnobotany research. 

References


New tree found in Vietnam


Discovery of a New Plant Genus


A Call for an Economic Botany/Ethnobotany Cluster at NSF


Ethnobotany


Centre for International Ethnomedicinal Education and Research


Discovery of new plant and animal species


Centre for Plant Biodiversity Research


Preventing Plant Blindness


International Association for Plant Taxonomy


American Society of Plant Taxonomists