#Quercus tardifolia

[rebeccathenaturalist]

That's so cool! And they found a few of them, and they're now growing seedlings in greenhouses for eventual replanting!

Quercus tardifolia is a relic species leftover from when the climate was much cooler and wetter in the past, and can only really live in a few high-elevation spots in Texas. It's definitely still at risk of extinction due to increasing heat and drought caused by climate change, but the discovery means this species still has a chance.

[wachinyeya]

Texas Oak Tree Thought to Be Extinct Discovered in Big Bend National Park https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/texas-oak-tree-thought-to-be-extinct-discovered-in-big-bend-national-park/

[sleepyleftistdemon]

America’s national parks are more than just places of rest and relaxation or protective zones around our country’s most bizarre, unique, and delicate landscape features, they are bastions of biodiversity.

Case and point, Big Bend National Park in Texas, where a species of oak unique to the state’s western mountain ranges was rediscovered having been declared extinct for some time.

Quercus tardifolia or the late-leaf oak, is a living relic of a bygone climactic period in Texas’ history when the Lone Star State was wetter and cooler. The tardifolia keeps its leaves all winter and regrows them very late into spring.

As such, the only place it can thrive is in north-facing canyons in Big Bend National Park’s Chisos Mountains where there is plenty of shade and moisture.

[geezerwench]

Quercus tardifolia or the late-leaf oak, is a living relic of a bygone climactic period in Texas' history when the Lone Star State was wetter

Wow. Some actual good news out of Texas.

[wolfnowl]

Texas Oak Tree Thought to Be Extinct Discovered in Big Bend National Park

YaY!! 🌳

[fatehbaz]

There was perhaps no one better than Cornelius H. Muller -- one of twentieth-century America’s most notable oak fanatics -- to document the continent’s most mysterious oak trees. In July 1932, the [...] botanist first encountered Quercus tardifolia while collecting samples in the steep-cut canyons of Texas’s Big Bend National Park. Muller jotted down details of the twigs (slender, somewhat fluted), buds (hairy at the tip), leaves (dull blue-green), and branches (short, stiff). [...] Then, as suddenly as it blinked into taxonomic existence, the species vanished from sight. In Muller’s wake, a succession of ecologists have scoured Big Bend for more of the species, trying to prove that it exists. None have succeeded. Ecologists only ever found one possible Q. tardifolia tree -- which may or may not have been Muller’s original specimen; it died around 2011, before it could be genetically analyzed or botanically cultivated for conservation. Today, Q. tardifolia has grown about as lonely as a species can get, with an estimated population in the double digits and a known range of one location. [...] If Q. tardifolia is, indeed, out there, drought, fire, or flood could wipe it out in hours. Every passing year, climate change makes this outcome increasingly likely. [...]

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Oaks have been around for about 56 million years, scientists estimate from fossilized pollen grains found near what is now Salzburg, Austria. Along their wind-pollinated and acorn-borne evolution, the genus Quercus has become one of the northern hemisphere’s most diverse [...]. More than 60 percent of the genus’s diversity lives in the Americas, in a swath from Canada’s southern border to Colombia’s northern Andes. They dominate in both biomass and diversity, making up between one-fifth and almost one-third of the aboveground biomass in continental U.S. and Mexican forestland, respectively. [...] “They were young upstarts. They pushed out things that were being squeezed into extinction,” Hipp said. In the grand history of North America’s plant communities, “oaks won.” [...] They also have a penchant for hybridizing, which may allow them to adapt more quickly to changing conditions such as extreme heat and new diseases.

This frequent hybridization can also blur oaks into a genetic smear like the one swarming across Big Bend. In a conservation system built on the worship of individual species -- like ours -- that taxonomic trickiness becomes a practical problem. [...] In Q. tardifolia’s case, long-standing debate over whether the tree is a distinct species or the genetic gray area between two oak parents threatens to undercut future conservation efforts. “Tardifolia is like this mystical thing,” said Béatrice Chassé, co-founder of Arboretum des Pouyouleix in France and editor of the journal International Oaks. Chassé has twice traveled to Big Bend looking for it, unsuccessfully, and told me she has yet to encounter any convincing evidence that it’s a species in its own right. “I can’t shake away the feeling,” she said, that what Muller saw was an evolutionary blip. “It’s just my opinion.”

And so the conundrums facing Knapp, Hipp, Eason, and Black -- Does Q. tardifolia still exist? And has it ever existed? -- span the full aperture of biological existence. The tree might be extinct, or too fragile to save from that eventual fate. It might be thriving, quietly, off the beaten track. It could be a mutant disguised as a taxonomic error. “I think it’s a great mystery,” Hipp said. 

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Other biologists went on to propose many frameworks for distinguishing the smallest pixels in life’s vast portraiture. Among them, the biological species concept reigns. (If you’ve ever taken a college-level biology course, it would have been the one included in your textbook.) Within this framework, members of a species are bound together, and set apart from others, by an ability to produce offspring. While popular, the biological species concept is imperfect. Its reliance on sexual reproduction immediately excludes asexual lifeforms. When it comes to extinct species, it demands information we may not be able to glean from fossils. And hybridization -- which occurs in about one-fourth of flowering plants and one-tenth of animals -- pokes a sizable hole in the framework’s fabric.

Scientists interested in how hybrids tangle the tree of life’s branches often turn to oaks as an example. If specieshood erects solid reproductive barriers, in the Quercus genus, these walls are littered with peepholes, windows, and doors. [...] “People think of science as an enterprise of certainty,” Hipp said. That couldn’t be further from the truth. He is completely unfazed by the prospect of a world that is uncertain to its roots, of one that is incompletely knowable. 

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Text published by: Marion Renault. “The Strange Quest to Save North America’s Most Elusive Oak Tree.” New Republic. 20 December 2021.

[zeamex]

‘Extinct’ Tree Is Still Alive in a Texas Park—but Barely

‘Extinct’ Tree Is Still Alive in a Texas Park—but Barely

Research group stands by Quercus tardifolia.Photo: U.S Botanic Garden Standing at 30 feet tall, with a trunk scarred by fire and a severe fungal infection, is the Chisos Mountains oak, or Quercus tardifolia, a species thought to be extinct. The tree is likely one fire or drought away from death. Researchers are now keen to protect this lonely survivor. The oak tree, presumed extinct by 2011, was…

[sainteldaily]

‘Extinct’ Tree Is Still Alive in a Texas Park—but Barely

‘Extinct’ Tree Is Still Alive in a Texas Park—but Barely

Standing at 30 feet tall, with a trunk scarred by fire and a severe fungal infection, is the Chisos Mountains oak, or Quercus tardifolia, a species thought to be extinct. The tree is likely one fire or drought away from death. Researchers are now keen to protect this lonely survivor. Read more…

[artikelalex]

Im Nationalpark in Texas: Ausgestorben geglaubte Eiche wiederentdeckt

Im Nationalpark in Texas: Ausgestorben geglaubte Eiche wiederentdeckt

Bisher gingen Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler davon aus, dass das letzte Exemplar einer bis dahin sehr seltenen Eichenart 2011 gestorben ist. Doch nun kann eine Forschergruppe diese Annahme widerlegen. Sie finden im Big Bend Nationalpark eine Quercus tardifolia – doch auch ihr geht es nicht gut. Weiterlesen…

[wachinyeya]

Botanical Researchers Are ‘Thrilled’ After Discovering an Oak Tree Once Thought to Be Extinct https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/botanical-researchers-thrilled-to-find-oak-tree-thought-extinct/

In Big Bend National Park in Texas, a coalition of 10 institutions have discovered an oak tree once thought to be extinct.

Botanical researchers were thrilled to find a lone Quercus tardifolia tree standing about 30 feet tall, though in poor condition.

First described in the 1930s, the last living specimen was believed to have perished in 2011.

Murphy Westwood of The Morton Arboretum says Q. tardifolia is considered one of the rarest—if not the rarest—oak in the world.

The team that made the discovery on May 25 found the trunk scarred by fire with signs of fungal infection. The group is now working with the National Park Service to reduce the immediate wildfire threat to the tree, and their conservationists are moving quickly to return to search for acorns and to attempt propagation, the process of breeding specimens from a parent plant.

“The Chisos Mountains support a high diversity of oak species, partly because of the wide range of habitats available in this ‘sky island’,” said Carolyn Whiting, a botanist at Big Bend National Park. “There is still much to learn about the oaks in the Chisos.”

“The United States Botanic Garden is thrilled about the success of this partnership and collecting trip that rediscovered such a rare oak,” said Susan Pell, acting executive director of the agency that funded and collaborated on the project. “This discovery is just the beginning of the conservation work we are doing to better understand and conserve threatened trees.”

How to save an oak tree

Oaks tend to hybridize, or crossbreed, which may allow them to adapt more quickly to changing climate conditions such as extreme heat and new diseases. This frequent hybridization can also blur the genetic lines between oak species in a given ecosystem like Big Bend.

According to Andrew Hipp, the Morton Arboretum senior scientist whose team will be conducting the genetic analysis, “This is an interesting problem. We’re looking into whether this tree is genetically similar to other trees that have been previously collected as Q. tardifolia. That should tell us whether this collection is the same as what Cornelius H. Muller named Q. tardifolia. It should also tell us whether this collection of specimens is genetically distinct enough from other closely related oaks in the area to warrant recognition as a species.”

Regardless of classification, Hipp noted that it is important to preserve more than individual species, but rather all the genetic variation in life. “Species are genetically distinct populations that we can generally recognize in the field,” he said. “But they aren’t the be-all and end-all of conservation. We also aim to protect the functional variation within species. Leaf forms, physiological responses to drought and fire and even tree longevity are all attributes that can be shared among populations and among species by gene flow. The functional variation that these new collections represent may be just what is needed to help oaks of the region adapt to environmental changes in the near or distant future.”

Oaks are exceptional among tree species in that their acorns cannot be traditionally seed banked for conservation purposes. According to the researchers, they must be preserved in the wild or in living collections, which is why the involvement of botanical gardens is critical. The researchers who found the Q. tardifolia tree are concerned that it is not producing acorns. Other methods of propagation, including grafting, are being pursued to preserve the oak’s future.

“It is incumbent upon us to learn from it and protect it while we still can, in order to inform future conservation efforts,” said Wesley Knapp, chief botanist at NatureServe, who participated in the expedition. “Nature rarely hands us a second chance, and I doubt we’ll get a third. We won’t waste it.”