Plant Species Extinction and Opportunities for De-extinction

Extinction has received considerable attention in animals, particularly charismatic vertebrates. Plants, like animals, face alarming extinction risks with many of the same underlying causes including habitat loss, climate change, disease, invasive species, and over harvesting. However, habitat modifications by humans might make it much more challenging for plants to respond to rapid contemporary climate change by shifting distributions, either because suitable habitat no longer exists or because the human-altered landscapes pose too great a barrier to dispersal for some species. De-extinction (i.e., the revival of genes or phenotypes of extinct species) has similarly received considerable attention in animals with little discussion in plants. De-extinction is already possible in plants, particularly for those species with close relatives for which there are rich genomic resources as well as the capacity for CRISPR-mediated gene editing and regeneration. Herbarium collections offer one important source of DNA for plants that have gone extinct in that time frame. The opportunities for de-extinction in plants will only increase as genomic resources and the tools for regeneration and genome editing improve. We also consider some of the ethical issues to de-extinction in plants, focusing our discussion of the topic to those plants clearly driven to extinction by human activity in just the past few hundred years.