SAN DIEGO — A binational collaboration is helping to protect plants on both sides of the United States-Mexico border.
While the border wall might separate the U.S. from Mexico, researchers are united in their goal of protecting the region’s most vulnerable plants.
Michelle Thompson is a conservation biologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum, and Mariana Delgado Fernández is the founder of Expediciones Botánicas.
They are part of a group of conservationists from the U.S. and Mexico who assessed every plant known to grow in the state of Baja California. They then published the comprehensive catalog of native plants, marking a significant step forward in protecting biodiversity across shared ecosystems.
“[The border wall is] an administrative boundary, but plants and animals don’t really go by those rules and so it’s really tricky," Thompson said. "So if you think about it, what does it mean to be maybe protected on one side of the border but not on the other, or there’s different rules? It becomes very complex to try and help conserve a species.”
Delgado said the list features more than 2,000 plants in the region, like the Braunton's Baja California milkvetch, an extremely rare plant that only grows on the south side of Tijuana where it is critically threatened by development.
“I have a lot of hopes with the list. I would love to see that the network of areas that are protected grows so that the next generation of people in Mexico are able to know all the unique plants that we share with California,” Delgado said.
According to The Nat, environmental regulations differ between the two countries, with the U.S. being stricter and more closely enforced than those in Mexico. The researchers believe the publication of this inventory list with rare, threatened and endemic plants will be used to get both governments on the same page and pave the way for a more cohesive and effective conservation strategy along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“Collaborating allowed us to have all this information, share knowledge, share resources and technology and be able to do better work in protecting these plants,” Delgado said.
“This is really a first step in what we’re hoping can be a broader coordination of conservation across the border,” Thompson said.
According to The Nat, this plant checklist will be instrumental in crafting a new state regulation for plants across border lines; it also has the potential to enforce fines on anyone who damages listed plants, rescue plants in danger of being cleared for development and lays the groundwork for further study of rare or threatened flora.