Transcript of These Botanists Are Scaling Cliffs to Save Endangered Plants

Hawaii's been referred to as the extinction capital of the US we're losing plants and animals that are incredibly high rate I take it as a personal responsibility to maintain what we still have welcome to the land of rare plants nearly 90% of Hawaiian plants don't grow anywhere else most of the plants are only found in these islands and oftentimes only on a ridge top or in a particular valley the involved in extreme isolation this isolation has made Hawaii's plants uniquely diverse but it also means they're really vulnerable to threats like invasive species Hawaii is home to about 45% of all endangered and threatened plants in the US and in the past two decades 27 species are thought to have gone extinct every plant and every bird and nearly every insect is identified and has a name in Hawaiian we lose that then we will lose a connection to our Hawaiian culture in history we do have an extinction crisis and I feel compelled to to help in any way that I can so let's just take a peek right up here at this little ledge Adam Williams and bed Nyberg are the indiana jones' of rare plants racing to save species from extinction drones have made it possible to search for plants on even the steepest cliffs I was kind of thinking that whole face that's kind of facing us you could pick out a spot that looks especially good to you okay here I go [Music] okay I got you you want to start there and work your way down then yeah that's probably what I'll do you we chose the cliff for a survey because that Valley is one of the most biodiverse in the whole state that's a whoopsie yeah Jim knows if iam there and ya know I'm bi with that amount of clip there's just a lot of areas that haven't been explored yet you see lip Okita yep Biden's seems like kind of hone genius grasses so I might kind of come back around as the climate is changing we don't know how that's gonna affect all these micro climate niches so we're making a push to to just continue our work at a quicker rate Ben sees exactly what the drone captured when he's back in his office this little plant with the white flowers with we were able to locate they're thought to be gone from around here we have at least 10 of them in the area which is significant fine now Ben and Adam are facing a grave new threat to Hawaii's ecosystem an invader called rapid ogia death Ohia trees are the lifeblood of Hawaii's biodiversity and central to its native culture 50% of all trees in Hawaii are Ohia almost all of our native forest ecosystems are dominated by Ohia volcano goddess Pele in her eruptions will destroy huge growth of Ohia and her favorite younger sister haka is the guardian of the hero force in hula new shoots and the flowers are used in lei making and they are a manifestation of those gods in 2014 scientists noticed that Ohia trees were mysteriously dying they now know that fungi are killing the okiya but they don't know how to stop the carnage a rapid ohia death went unchecked it would be Cataclysm it kills trees so fast that our hillsides would become all brown and dead erosion we become a big issue so Ben and Adam need to collect rare plants before the forests that support them disappear we've been making an extra push to find rare plant populations in case that is severely altered the rapido Hyuga [Music] okay so we're descending now just about to go over the edge [Music] [Applause] what we wanted to do was select some will tell Xavier plants that had seeds on them collect the seeds and then we could bring them into our nursery and help keep the species going if it were to go extinct in the wild we'll see a hobby is a federally listed endangered species we think there's about 6,000 individuals laughs so pretty rare and dry cliff habitat that they're known from is in threats from goats so we want to make sure that we get to all the plants it wasn't very nice getting cotton right but at least I had already made three successful seed collections from three different plants and tagged them these are the seeds I got today each of these is from a different plant so it was a good haul I get this question a lot is there I use for humans for these plants some of them do have uses but I don't think that that makes them necessarily more important for conservation hopefully by conserving that plant and preventing its extinction we'll be able to one day restore part of that ecosystem they're spectacular and they should be preserved for that reason alone [Music]